Startling Stories v18n03 (1949 01)

A THRILLING
PUBLICATION

j4n jQstonisfiinq Novel

Bq HENRY KUTTNER

MARTIAN GESTURE

■

TRANSATLANTIC PICTURES PRODUCTION

yC* you’re that man, here’s something that will in-
Ur terest you.

Not a magic formula — not a get-rich-quick scheme—
but something more substantial, more practical.

Of course, you need something more than just the
idesire to be an accountant. You’ve got to pay the price
—be willing to study earnestly, thoroughly.

Still, wouldn’t it be worth your while to sacrifice
some of your leisure in favor of interesting home study
— over a comparatively brief period ? Always provided
that the rewards were good — a salary of $3,000 to
$ 10 , 000 ?

An accountant's duties are interesting, varied and of
real worth to his employers. He has standing!

Do you feel that such things aren’t for you? Well,
don’t be too sure. Very possibly they can be !

Why not, like so many before you, investigate
LaSalle’s modern Problem Method of training for an
accountancy position?

Just suppose you were permitted to work in a large
accounting house under the personal supervision of an
expert accountant. SupposS, Vith his aid, you studied
accounting principles and solved problems day by day
—easy ones at first — then more difficult ones, if you
could do this — and could turn to him for advice as the
problems became complex — soon
you’d master them all.

That’s the training you follow in
principle under the LaSalle Problem
Method.

Over 2800 Certified
Public Accountants among
LaSalle alumni

You cover accountancy from the basic Principles right
up through Accountancy Systems and Income Tax Pro-
cedure. Then you add C. P. A. Training and prepare
for the C. P. A. examinations.

As you go along, you absorb the principles of Audit-
ing, Cost Accounting, Business Law, Statistical Con-
trol, Organization, Management and Finance.

Your progress is as speedy as you care to make it—
depending on your own eagerness to learn and the time
you spend in study.

Will recognition come? The only answer, as you
know, is that success does come to the man who is really
trained. It’s possible your employers will notice your
improvement in a very few weeks or months. Indeed,
many LaSalle graduates have paid for their training —
with increased earnings — before they have completed
it! For accountants, who are trained in organization
and management, are the executives of the future.

Write For This Free Book
For your own good, don’t put off investigation of all
the facts. Write for our free 48-page book, "Accoun-
tancy, The Profession That Pays.” It'll prove that
accountancy offers brilliant futures to those who aren’t
afraid of serious home study. We’ll also include "Ten
Years’ Promotion in One” — a book which has
helped many men. Send us the
coupon now.

LASALLE EXTENSION
CHICAGO 5, ILL.

Other LaSalle
Opportunities

O Higher Accountancy

□ C.P.A. Coaching

□ Bookkeeping

□ Law : LL.B. Degree
O Business Management
0 Salesmanship

0 Traffic Management
0 Foremanship
0 Induetr’l Management
Q gtenotypy

4 Machine Shorthand)

LASALLE EXTENSION UNJVERSITY

A CORRESPONDENCE INSTITUTION

417 S. Dearborn St. Dep»- 1329-HR Chicago 5, III.

I want to be an accountant. Send me without obligation, "Account-
ancy, the Profession that Pays” training program — also "Tea
Years' Promotion in One.”

Name Age.

Address .....

City, Z0ff( & £f#/?tn!tHltMMMM»tHHH.MHtltm.t.fmttt!f.MHItt«ftMmit'.»*MUUMtM9l»

Vol. 18, No. 3

A THRILLING PUBLICATION

January, 1949

A Complete Novel

THE TIME AXIS

By HENRY KUTTNER

Rich man, scientist, soldier, scribe, these are
summoned to a far-distant future that they may
save a galaxy from the threat of creeping doom! 13

Two Complete Novelets

THE SUB STANDARD SARDINES . . Jack Vance 98

Magnus Ridolph becomes involved in the most fantastic business
partnership in all the history of galactic development!

MARTIAN GESTURE Alexander M. Phillips 112

What were those strange Bashes of light that destroyed cities of
Shentol? A Hall of Fame classic reprinted by popular demand

Short Stories

FLAW John D. MacDonald 83

“I never thought much about the frontier of the stars until. . .

THE STORY OF ROD CANTRELL Murray Leinster 88

Scientist Jugg plans to enslave the world with his force-Betd torpedo

THE FISSION MAN R. W. Stockheker 135

Perhaps they still know him as Dr, John Norman — or just as Project X

FORBIDDEN VOYAGE Rene LaFayette 142

George Carlyle knew the way to the Moon — but authorities blocked him

Features

THE ETHER VIBRATES (Announcements and Letters) The Editor 6

SCIENCE FICTION FAN PUBLICATIONS A Review 168

SCIENCE FICTION BOOKSHELF A Department 176

Cover Painting by Earle Bergey — Illustrating “The Time Axis”

STARTLING STORIES. Published every other month by Better Publications, Inc., N. L. Pines. President, at 4600 Diverse*
Are., Chicago 39, III. Editorial and executive offices, 10 East 40tli St., New York 16, N. Y. Entered as second-class matter
November 22, 1946, at the post office at Chicago, Illinois, under the act of March 8. 18T9. Copyright. 1948, by Better
Publications, Inc. Subscription (12 issues). $3.00; single copies, $-25; foreign and Canadian postage extra. In corre-
sponding with this magazine please include postal zone number, if any. Manuscripts will not be returned unless
accompanied by self-addressed, stamped envelopes and are submitted at the author's risk. Names of all characters used
In stories and semi-fiction articles are fictitious. IT the name of any living person or existing institution is used, it is a
coincidence, PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.

WARN R AMO

easily you can
get started. No
•obligation ! Mau ..*•, >f&4

Coupon in en- & v 1

velope or paste Mjii

ion penny postal.

5 Send NOW! JXMIT»,Pres^s|s|
' SsgL SA09, NrtimlMolnst., Picnatr^
Bsme Stub Radio School. WasliinelooS. D.C.

JSKffiSk

As part of my Course, I send you the speaker, tubes.

chassis, transformer, loop antenna, EVERYTHING you

need to build this modern, powerful Radio Receiver I In

addition I send you parts to build other real Radio cir-

cuits, some of which are

pictured below. You use
material to get practical
Rddib experience and
;> make EXTRA money
Hexing neighbors’ Radios
gin spare time.

/ SEND YOU BIG KITS OF PARTS

“ ' and Experiment
With this MODERN RADIO

AND MANY OTHER CIRCUITS

_oupon for Actual Lesson and
64-page book, “How to Be a Suc-
cess in Radio -Television -Elec-
tronics.” Both FREE! See how
I train you at home— bow you

LE. SMITH, President
national Radio Institute

TRAINED THESE MEN

“AM NOW
„ GETTING
§ $60 a week
j and over-
time as Ra-
dio Service-
m an for
I The Adams
Appliance Co.” — W. A.
ANGEL, Blytheeville,
Arkansas.

“KNEW
j NOTHING
ABOUT
RADIO
J when I en-
rolled. Now
gam doing

3 spare time

1 have more
- — paid for my
Course and about $200
worth of equipment.”
—RAYMOND HOLT-
CAMP, Vandalia, 111.

get practical Radio experience
' ‘lding, testing Radio circuits
BiG KITS OF PARTS

buil
with
I send.

Make EXTRA Meite? White Learning

The day you enroll I send
EXTRA money manuals, show
you how to make EXTRA
money fixing neighbors’
Radios in spare time. It’s
probably easier than ever
to start now, because Ra-
dio Repair Business is

booming. Trained Radio Tech-
nicians find profitable opportuni-
ties in Police, Aviation, Broad-
casting, Marine Radio, Public
Address work. Think of even
greater opportunities as demand
for Television, FM, Electronic
Devices keeps growing I

SEE What NRI Can Do For Yon!

Mail Coupon for FREE Lesson'
and 64-page book. Read details

men

now

VETERANS

You’wcan get
this training
under G. I. Bill.
Mail Coupon.

My Course Includes Training in

TELEVISION • ELECTRONICS

FREQUENCY MODULATION

about my Course, letters from
men I trained about what they

earn.

MR. J. E. SMITH. President, Dept. 9A09
NATIONAL RADIO INSTITUTE, Washington 9, 0. C.

Mall me FREE Sample Lesson and 64-page book,
(No saleeQian will call. Please write plainly.).

Age -

W»ma

Addreea
City —

Zone

State

O Check if Veteran

J UST one hundred and fifty-one years
ago Thomas Robert Malthus, former
ninth wrangler of Jesus College, Cam-
bridge and former Curate of Albury, pub-
lished a famous treatise upon the principle of
population. From this was developed his still
more famous Essay on Population, which for-
warded the quite reasonable proposition that
the future of mankind was sharply limited
by the food raising capacity of the world.

It was Dr. Malthus’ idea that while growth
of population,, unchecked, increased in geo-
metrical ratio, agriculture increased in the
vastly slower arithmetical ratio. Thus hu-
manity was virtually foredoomed to starve
itself to death.

All in all it was a sane if pessimistic fore-
east. But it is doubtful if, despite present
starvation conditions in much of the world,
any greater proportion of humanity is today
going hungry than went without sufficient
vitamins in Dr. Malthus’ era. And this despite
a trebling of population throughout the
world.

Malthusians, as the Malthus followers are
generally known, didn’t know about a lot of
things that were going to happen. There was
the vast world colonization of the nineteenth
century, for instance, to say nothing of mod-
em agricultural, machinery, which increased
food production beyond all expectation. And
another factor that spoiled the deal was the
fact that humanity, by and large, cares too
much for the full stomach to let itself starve
for the sake of a theory, no matter how pro-
found it may be.

Healthy Cynicism

What we are trying to get at is that theo-
ries, no matter how reasonable they may
look and sound, are things to view with a
healthy cynicism. The one big hitch in all of
them is that they are propounded by humans
— and no human yet lives who can foresee all

«

influences operating on even the most
minescular of apparent facts.

Charles Fort had this distrust of the pedan-
tic to a marked degree — and whether one
finds him nestor or nincompoop, one must
respect his almost virulent suspicion of es-
tablished ideas. Inevitably, every formula for
the future must succumb to the exigencies
of the present of which it inevitably becomes
a part. This goes for Marxists (those Canu-
tist folk who seek to force humanity and
history into line with the one-note philoso-
phy of their single-Smith-Brother prophet)
as well as Malthusians.

In the past the western world lived for
some centuries with the Copernrcan theory
— which had a dish-shaped Terra inhabiting
the diametric center of the universe. You all
know what happened to that one.

Gravitation Works

And when Isaac Newton was beaned by
the apple he laid down the laws of attraction
which we call gravitation. That one has
stood up pretty well to date — chiefly because
it worked. Currently scientific deep thinkers
and others (notably Roger Babson, who is
seeking nullification of the entire law) are
digging or attempting to dig more deeply into
the question of what enables Chinese, Aus-
tralians and others to walk upside down
without falling into space.

We would hate to bet that Sir Isaac’s ap-
plefall theorem’s days are unnumbered.
Usually investigation brings new factors into
the open which upset the best- laid theories.
Result — a new set of rules which endure un-
til a still newer set of principles are brought
to bear upon it.

Mind you, without such “rules" it is doubt-
ful if human thinking would have progressed
at all. Each operates within the range of
factors known to its evolvers, ultimately en-
( Continued <m pay* 8)

THOUSANDS NOW PLAY

who never thought they could!

Thrilled by Playing

I've had my lessons just a week. I think
your course is super. I was more thrilled
than words can express when I found I
could actually play America, The Merry
Widow Waltz and the others.

*J. T., Mancelona, Mich.

Wouldn’t Take $1000 (or Course

The lessons are so simple that anyone can
understand them. I hare learned to play
by note in a little more than a month. I
wouldn’t take a thousand dollars for my
course. *8. E. A., Kansas City, Mo.

Shares Course With Sister

The teaching is so interesting and the
pieces so beautiful I couldn’t ask for any-
thing better. I recommend your course
highly. My sister shares it with me and
feels the same way.

*D. E. G„ Wausau, Wise.

Finding New Joy

I am finding a new Joy that I
never experienced before, for I
hare always wanted to play, but
had given up hope until I heard
of your course.

*C, S, Lucien, Okla.

Plays After 2 Months

I hesitated before sending for your
course because of an earlier ex-
perience I had with a course by
ear from another company. I am
playing pieces now I never dreamed
I would play after only two months.
*E. T.. Prichard, Ala.

•Actual pupils* names on request.
Pictures by professional models.

You, too, can play any instrument
By this EASY A-B-C Method

Y OU think It’s difficult to learn
music? That’s what thousands
of others have thought! Just like
you, they long to play some instru-
ment — the piano, violin, guitar,
saxophone or other favorites. But
they denied themselves the pleasure
— because they thought it took
months and years of tedious study
to learn.

Learn in Spare Time at Home

And then they made an amaaing dis-
covery ! They learned about a wonderful
way to learn music at home — without a
private teacher — without tedious study —
and in a surprisingly short time. They
wrote to the U. S. School of Music for the
facts about this remarkable short-cut
method. And the facts

Bpare time at home for only a few cents
a day. Never mind if you have no musical
knowledge or talent. Just read the fas-
cinating booklet and Print and Picture
sample that explain all about the U. S.
School method. (Instruments supplied when
needed, cash or credit.) Tear out the cou-
pon now, before you turn the page. U. S.
School of Music,

2941 Brunswick
Bldg., New York
10, N. Y. (Blst
year)

FREE!

Print and Picture
Sample

NOTICE

Prices of our courses
hare not gone up.
Music lessons still
cost only a few cents
a day. Remember, we
don’t teach music
“by ear’* or by num-
bers. We teach you
to play by standard
notes.

opened their eyes ! They
were amazed to find how
easy it was to learn.

The result? Over 850,000
men and women have studied
music at home this simple,
A-B-C way. Now, all over
the world, enthusiastic mu-
sic-lovers are enjoying the
thrilling satisfaction of cre-
ating their own music. They
have found the key to good
times, popularity and
profit.

Costs only few cents a Day

And that’s what you can
do, right now. Get the proof
that you, too, can learn to
play your favorite instru-
ment — quickly, easily, in

U. S. SCHOOL OF MUSIC,

2941 Brunswick Bldg., New York 10, N. Y.

I am interested
checked below.
“How to Learn
Picture Sample.

Piano

Guitar

Hawaiian

Guitar

Violin

Piano Accordion

in mu9io study, particularly in the instrument
Please send me your free illustrated booklet
Musio at Home/' and your free Print and

Saxophone
Trumpet, Cornet
Reed Organ
Tenor Banjo
Ukulele

Clarinet

Trombone

Flute

Modern

Elementary

Harmony

Practical

Finger

Control

Piccolo

Mandolin

Name...

(Please print)

Address...

Have you
Instrument?...

City...

...State...

NOTE: If you are under 18 years of age, parent must sign coupon.

"sAVI E~2e — "STICK "cOUPQ NON ~PE NnYpI 38TCA RD* ""

Troubled with

DEAFNESS?

— then you'll be thrilled with the new
revolutionary Zenith "75" Radionic Hear-
ing Aid. You can order it by mail without
risking a penny. Let a 10-Day Trial at
home, at church, at business, prove it's
the finest hearing aid you can buy regard-
less of price. Saves you over $100.00.

HEAR BETTER

or Pay Nothing

Light, compact single unit. Costs less than
a cent an hour for battery consumption.
Comes ready to wear. Accepted by the
Council of Physical Medicine, American
Medical Association. Send postcard now
(no obligation) for full particulars telling
how tens of thousands of hard-of-hearing
men, women and children have found new
joy and happiness with this amazing new
hearing aid.

Look only to your doctor lor advice \

on your ears and hearing s ®|||

RADIO

CORPORATION
HEARING AID DIVISION

Depf. TZ 1 9, 5801 W. Dickens A ve. f Chicago 39
Makers of the World-Famous Zenith Radios.
Leaders in Radionics Exclusively for 30 Years.

Now let Bob West, radio's favorite guitar
player, show you how! Most “Courses’' have
only 6 or 8 pictures— but Bob’s new method
has 15 actual photographs! It not only teaches
but shows exactly where and how to place your
fingers, etc. Most others offer a few songs—
Bob provides 101!— chosen for their radio
popularity so you can sing and play right along
with your favorite radio program or records!

SEND NO MONEY: touend

name and address to Bob West and pay postman $1.69 plus COD and
postage. Start playing beautiful chords the very first day. Be playing
beautiful music in two weeks or get your money back, ,

TRY IT ON

MONEY-BACK OFFER

EASY NEW METHOD

SHOWS HOW TO

BOB WEST, 1101 Ni Paulina, Dept. 219, Chicago 22 , ill.

THE ETHER VIBRATES

( Continued from page 6)

abling them to rear upon it something more
broadly gauged.

But no theory, during its period of use, de-
serves the worship accorded it by those un-
fortunate humans who like a tidy world of
thought, with each and every idea neatly
dovetailing into both its neighbors. It has its
uses, yes. But it is dollars to the proverbial
perforated crullers that it just ain’t so.

Plenty of allegedly intelligent folk have
fought and bled and died for the idea that a
straight line is the shortest distance between
two points — utterly forgetting that there
simply cannot be a straight line that will
cling to the surface of a sphere such as
Earth.

Readers of science fiction are, for the most
part, great theorists. They must be or they
would not enjoy the speculative basis upon
which all science fiction is reared. Occasion-
ally, as this column has revealed in its letters
from readers, they cling stubbornly to some
pet formula until hit over the head so hard
that they regretfully loosen their grip.

The idea that nothing is actually so in the
realm of the mind seems to panic too many
people. But nothing that they cling to can
change the shiftiness of all human concepts.
In so clinging they are playing Canute all by
themselves with the tide of the imagination
— and just as fruitlessly.

Once this concept is accepted it ceases to
hold terror for anyone. Theories become the
speculations they actually are and, by play-
ing with them in proper perspective, the
range of thinking is increased beyond all
limits. Such freedom is the basis of all crea-
tive thought — and only in creation can any of
us find lasting satisfaction.

Actually, of course, our theory that all
theories are in themselves without reality is
as fallacious as any other idea advanced by
a member of the species jestingly referred
to as homo sapiens. But we’re trebly darned
if we aren’t going to cling to it anyway. So
be it.

OUR NEXT ISSUE

R OD CANTRELL, whose trick of tele-
portation does considerable world-

( Continued on page 10)

It's Amazing! Its Sensational! Its Exclusive!

makes learning to dance easier than ever!

Even if you never danced before you can become a popular partner
in a fraction of the usual time "The New Arthur Murray Way"

DANCE STUDIOS FROM COAST-TO- COAST
Visit the one nearest you for

a FREE dance analysis

ADDRESS...

CITY ZONE-

-STATE.

Tf-JAN.

"First Step to Popularity.” Lite
magic you find yourself leading or
following a smart new Fox Trot,
Rumba, Samba. You can actually
go out dancing after one hour even
if you’ve never danced before.

Stop Passing Up Good Times
Only at an Arthur Murray Studio
can you get that wonder-working
combination of his new, improved
exclusive methods and the trained
skill of his teachers. You’ll be a joy
to dance with, a pleasure to watch.
Get a dance analysis free at any
Arthur Murray Studio. Come in or
phone now.

ARTHUR

MURRAY

Take Arthur Murray’s short-cut to
good times. Find the self-confidence
and popularity you’ve always wanted.

Only a few hours at any Arthur
Murray Studio will transform you
into an expert dancer. His unique
methods make learning easy and fast !
The key to all new dances is Arthur
Murray’s basic discovery — the

ARTHUR MURRAY STUDIOS: Please send me your
magazine, "Murray-Go-Round,” 44 pages of
pictures and instructions on the latest ballroom
dances. Fox Trot, Waltz, Rumba, Samba, etc.
I enclose 25c.

ONLY

PROOF You can dance after! lesson!

See how quickly you can learn
to dance “The New Arthur Murray Way/*
Send for the “Murray-Go-Round” today!
It contains instructions on the Fox Trot,
Waltz and all dances. Consult your tele-
phone directory and MAIL THIS COU-
PON TO YOUR NEAREST ARTHUR
MURRAY STUDIO; or send it to Arthur
Murray (Studio 19), II East 43rd St., New
York 17, N. Y.

Ccpr. 1348 — Arthur Murray Inc.

44 PAGE DANCE MAGAZINE

>

Inside Trade information On:

How to use the steel square — How to file and
cet saws— How to build furniture — How to use
a mitre box — How to use the chalk line — How
to use rules and^cales — How to make joints —
Carpenters arithmetic — Solving mensuration

problems — Estimating etrepgth of timbers —
How to set girders and sills — How to frame
bouses and roofs — How to estimate costs — How

to build houses, barns, garages, bungalows, etc.

— How to read and draw plans — Drawing up
specifications — How td excavate — How to use
settings 12. 13 and 17 on the steel square — How
to build hoists and scaffolds — skylights — How

to build stairs — How to put on interior trim — .

How to hang doors — How to lath — lay floors — How to paint.

AUDELS Carpenters
and Builders Guides

4vo§s.$6

AUDEL, Publishers, 49 W. 23rd St, New York 10, N. Y.

Mail Aucfeis Carpenters and Builders Guides, 4 vets., on 7 days’ treat
trial, if OK 5 will remit in 7 days and $1 monthly until $6 is paid*
•Otherwise I will return them. No obligation unless 1 am satisfied.

Name , ..
Address — -

Occupation.

Employed Tir PAL

BE A DETECTIVE

WORK HOME or TRAVEL. Experience unnecessary.

DETECTIVE Particulars FREE. Write to

GEO. R. H. WAGNER, 125 W. 86th St., N. Y.

STUDY AT HOME for Business Suc-
cess and LARGER PERSONAL EARN-
INGS. 39 years expert instruction —
over 114,000 students enrolled. LL.B.
Degree awarded. All texts furnished.
Easy payment plan. Send for FREE
BOOK NOW — "Law and Executive
Guidance.”

AMERICAN EXTENSION SCHOOL OF LAW
Dept. 10-T, 64$ N. Michigan Ave., Chicago 11, III.

ENTIRE FAMILY

(2 to, 4 Persons) INSURED!

A DAT’

Genuine Legal Reserve

LIFE INSURANCE

Insurance for every mem*
ber of your family (2 to 4
persons) • • » only 4c a
day (not par pars on, but
for all!)

Pays You for death of any
member of you r family group.

Hays your family should you
die. Unusual protection at un*
believably low cost! Send for ,
sample policy today! No cost, •

»or obligation. No salesman,

Will call. Write-

SERVICE LIFE INS. CO, Dept, 4, Omaha 2, Nebr.

THE ETHER VIBRATES

( Continued from page 8)

saving in our current issue, emerges under
the able guidance of author Murray Leinster
as the chief figure in THE BLACK GAL-
AXY, the complete novel which leads the
story parade of STARTLING STORIES for
March.

His other-world gadget has enabled him to
become the pioneer interplanetary explorer
of Earth and he is infuriated with a politics-
ridden Space Project Committee. He and '
his secretary, pretty Pat Bowen, visit the
Stellaris, fii’st real space-ship, which Cantrell
has been designing, before he is kicked up-
stairs to a desk job he doesn’t want.

Construction is still going on and, through
a worker’s accident, the ship, still incomplete
and utterly unarmed, is sent flashing into
the “other” space, a universe of complete
darkness, in which its hyper-drive operates.

Cantrell has been removed from his job
as chief space-explorer because of his in-
sistence, thanks to a booby-trapped pyramid
of strange design he found on Calypso during
one of his previous space-flights, that some
intelligent species, hostile to all other space-
travelers and their worlds, has long been
roving the star lanes. At some time, perhaps
a few thousand years ago, they have utterly
wiped out an advanced Martian civilization
and left the planet dead and gutted behind
them.

The Stellaris and its passengers — hardly a
crew in any sense of the word — are virtually
a space- derelict and forced to rely upon their
wits and ingenuity, as well as Cantrell’s bril-
liant leadership. They are tracked down by
the alien race, who travel in immense pyra-
mids and are utterly foreign and vicious to
all human concepts.

Before the final battle is fought amid the
shining stars Cantrell and his little group ,
have traveled through a journey that makes
this novel one of the most scientifically in-
genious as well as stirring science fiction
stories ever to emerge from the Leinster
typewriter. March means a big novel in SS.

Clifford D. Simak’s fine novelet, THE
LOOT OF TIME, is back for a Hall of Fame
encore. This simply written, highly imag-
inative tale is one of the best space operas
after the old school ever written. It tells of
men of today who, in the first of all time ma-
( Continued on page 150)

10

The Mysterious Influence

In The Air You Breathe !

j.HE SOUL OB THE UNIVERSE is in the air you
breathe. Deposited in your blood— with each
inhalation you take— is the intelligence that
' directs the course of the planets through the
misty reaches of space, and the strange phe-
nomenon of life itself.

What is it that causes your heart to beat,
your lungs to expand and contract? What mind
directs the cells of your being, each in their pur-
pose — some to create bone, others tissue and
hair? What consciousness pervades these vibra-
tory globules of life and gives them awareness of
their Cosmic function? 1

Are you one of the millions who have looked
leyond yourself lot some external Divine Power
or agency? Have you searched in vain for some
outer sign or word of Divine assurance when
in doubt or in need? Now learn of the unsus-
pected power that exists in every simple breath
— and that becomes part of you. The ancient
Egyptians believed that the essence of life was
borne on the wings of the air. The Bible pro-

claims that with the first breath man becomes
not just an animated being — but a' ’living soul. ”
Try this experiment, and prove a Vital Life Force
exists in. the air. When you are in pain or de-
spondent take a deep breath. Hold it as long as
comfortable— then notice the momentary relief.

This Amazing Free Book

Would you seriously like to know how to draw upon
this Intelligence of the Cosmic, with which the air is
permeated? You can use it to awaken the creative
powers of your mind, and for making life an experi-
ence of achievement. Use the coupon below for a free
copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life.” It tells how
in the privacy of your home you may learn to use these
simple, useful, natural laws.

I USE THIS GIET COUPON ■ -

Scribe A.E.Y. The Rosicrucians (AMORC)

Rosicrucian Park, San Jose, California I

I am sincerely interested in learning how to use the >
mysterious influences of the universe in the betterment I
ot mv_ life. Please send me a free copy of the book, *

“The Mastery of Life.'
NAME.

ADDRESS-

Rosicrucians art NOT a religious organization

THE SOilCBUCiiOfg (AMORC) SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA, U. S. A.

1 1 FIGURED HE D f GOT HERE 1 J WHEN WE ^WHY THAfS «JEB V THAT'S
H EAD FOR TH E /JUST IN TIME V SORROWED JEB'S ) SCOTT’S CAR/ A. ME, ALL
BEARING. SO.I k TO SAVE, i CAR, WE SHOULDA AT HEN YOU MUSTlRIGHT.'
TOOK A SHORT- A MY LIFE/#TAKEN HIS TRAILER.) BE HIS HOUSE m 00
.CUT AND.. .jSg&i V TOO GUEST/ Ji V

£*«®y

BAVG/\

EH? WHAT
wTHE.,.1

THIN GILLETTES

, ARE MIGHTY <
POPULAR com 1
HERE. THEY’RE j
L PLENTY KEENJ

W WELL, JUNE, IT 'l
/SOUNDS LIKE YOU ’
TWO COULDN’T WAIT
i TO MEET FORMALLY.
| IWAS GOING TO \
| BRING BILL OVER/
ikTHIS EVENING J

'UNCLE JEB,
.YOU’RE A

Lpeach^

' BLADES. |
.YOU BET/
) TRY THIS/
' THIN N
^GILLETTE

'SHE'S

LOVELY

I HES A FINE YOUNG ) I KNEW YOU'D LIKE HIM, ^
"man. excellent < colonel. i’ve approached
appearanceandihim REGARDING A JUNIOR \i
.VERY INTELLIGENT ^^ PARTNERSHIP^..*'#

YOU ENJOY SWELL, EASY SHAVES . . . '

.WITH THIN GILLETTES.

/QUICK AND CLEAN
THEY ARE THE KEENEST BLADES INTHE LOW- J
PRICE FIELD AND FAR OUTLAST ALL OTHERS. J
MADE TO FIT YOUR GILLETTE RAZOR PRECISELY,'!
THIN GILLETTES CANNOT SCRAPE OR IRRITATE '
L YOUR FACE. ASK FOR THIN GILLETTES IN
\THE CONVENIENT N6W-10 BLADE PACKAGE

WHERE HAS THIS
BLADE SEEN ALL
MY LIFE/ THAT'S
THE SLICKEST
i SHAVE I'VE HAS/
V IN YEARS A/

WILD TURKEY HUNTING IN A SOUTHERN
NATIONAL FOREST CAN HARDLY BE CLASSED
ASA DANGEROUS SPORT, BUT WHEN A
WOUNDED WILD BOAR INTRUDES. . .

CHAPTER I
Encounter in Rio

Rich man, scientist, soldier, scribe, are
summoned to a far-distant future to
save a galaxy from creeping death!

T HE whole thing never happened and
I can prove it — now. But Ira De
Kalb made me wait a billion years to
write the story.

So we start with a paradox. But the

strangest thing of all is that there are
real paradoxes involved, not one. This is
a record of logic. Not human logic, of
course, not the logic of this time or this
space.

Through the Core of 1

I don’t know if men will ever journey
again, as we journeyed, to that intersection
of latitude and longitude where a shell hangs
forever — forever and yet not forever, in
space and out of space — on the axis stretch-
ing through time from beginning to end.

From the dawn of the nebulae to the
•twilight of absolute entropy, when the frame-
work of the cosmos has broken down into
chaos, still that axis will stretch from dawn
to dusk, from beginning to end. For as this
world spins on an axis through space, so the
sphere of time spins on its own axis.

I never understood the ultimate answer.
That was beyond me. It took the combined
skills of three great civilizations far apart in
time to frame that godlike concept in which
the tangible universe itself was only a single
factor.

And even then it was not enough. It took
the Face of Ea — which I shall never be able
to describe fully.

I saw it, though. I saw it, luminous in the
reddish dusk, speaking to me silently above
the winds that scout perpetually across the
dead, empty lands of a day yet to come. I
think it will stand there forever in an empty
land on a dead planet, watching the endless
night draw slowly on through days as long
as years. The stars will stand and the Earth-
nekropolis will stand and the Face wall stand
there forever. I was there. I saw it.

Was there? Will be? May be? I can’t
tell now.

But of all stories in the world, this more
: than any needs a pattern.

Since the beginning is in the past, before
men as such existed at all, the only starting
place I know is a temporal and personal one,
when I was drawn into the experiment.
Now that I know a little more- about the
nature of time it seems clearer to me that
past, present and future were all stepping
stones, arranged out of sequence. The first
step took place two months ago.

That was here in this time and space. Or
in the time and space that existed two months
i ago. There’s been a change. . . .

*****

OW this is the way it used to be.

For me, the Big Ride. You start
j when you’re born. You climb on the tobog-

ime, a Strange Quartet

gan and then you’re off. But you can only
have the one ride. No use telling the ticket-
taker you want to go again. They shovel
you under at the end of the slope and there’s
a new lot of passengers waiting. You’ve had
your three-score and ten. And it’s over.

I’d ridden the toboggan for thirty-five
years. Jeremy Cortland, jerry Cortland of
the Denver Post, the Frisco Call- Bulletin,
PM, AP, Time, Colliers — sometimes staff,
sometimes roving assignments. I leaned out
of the toboggan and plucked fruit from the
orchards as I sped by. Strange fruit, some-
times. Generic term is News. And that
covers a lot of territory.

There was a splinter in the toboggan’s
seat. I had on red flannel underwear. I had
a nervous tic. I couldn’t sit still. I kept
reaching out, grabbing. Years of it, of by-
lines that said “cabled by Jeremy Cortland.”

Russia, China, war coverage, Piccard’s
bathyscaphe, the supersonic and alto-
stratosphere planes, the Russian earth-borer
gadget, the Big Eye at Palomar — the coal
strikes and the cracker lynchings and that
dirt farmer in North Dakota who suddenly
began to work miracles. (His patients didn’t
stay cured, you remember, and he disap-
peared.)

The Big Ride. In between I grabbed at
other things. One marriage, one divorce.
And more and more binges. Long bouts,
between assignments. I didn’t give a — well,
you can’t use that word in some papers. But
it was all right. What did I expect, heaven?

The eyes aren’t quite as clear as they used
to be. The skin under them is a little puffy.
One chin begins to be not quite enough. But
it’s still the Big Ride. With a splinter in the
seat.

Dodging alimony payments, I skipped to
Brazil, got in on a submarine exploration
of the Amazon, wrote it up, sold it to AP
as a feature. The first installment appeared
on the same day as another little item — -
buried in the back — that said 85 and 87 had
been made artificially.

Astatine and francium — the missing link
in the periodic table — two billion years ago
you could have picked up all the astatine and
francium you wanted, just by reaching down
and grabbing. If you’d been around at the
time. Since then 85 and 87 have decayed

Must Travel to Battle the Ultimate Nekron!

into other elements. But Seaborg and
Ghiorso at UC made them synthetically, with
the big cyclotron and atomic oven transmu-
tation, and the column on one side of that
trivial item said SECOND BURN-DEATH

that concerned me though I didn’t know it at
the time. It seemed that Ira De Kalb was
working with Military Intelligence on some
sort of highly secret project — so secret you
could read all about it as far south as Rio

The brilliant neural webbing had amplified, and there was a pale glow banging over the motionless figure

(CHAP. XIX)

VICTIM FOUND, and on the other there
was a crossword puzzle.

I didn’t care, either.

Those deaths, by an indefinable sort of
burning, were just starting to confound the
United States authorities at the time. They
hadn’t yet spread to South America.

There was another item in that same paper

if you had the price of the paper. I didn’t
care about that either — not then.

I had my own current problem. And it
was a very odd one.

The thing started six weeks before it
began. You’ll have to get used to paradox —
which isn’t paradox once you grasp the idea.

It started in an alky in Rio, a little cobbled

STARTLING STORIES

16

tunnel opening off the Rua d’Ouvidor, and
what I was doing there at three o’clock of a
summer morning in January I’ll never be
able to tell you. I’d been drinking. Also I’d
been playing chemin de fer and there was a
thick pad of banknotes in the inside pocket
of my white jacket, another stuffed into the
dark wine-colored cummerbund I was wear-
ing.

Looking down, I could see the toes of my
shoes twinkling in the moonlight as I walked.
The sky twinkled too, and the lights up in
the hills and out on the bay. The world was
a shiny place, revolving gently around me.

I was rich. But this time it was going to
last. This time I'd cut out the binges and
take a little house up in Petropolis, where
it’s cool, and I’d really get down to work
on the analysis of news-coverage I’d been
planning for so long. I’d made up my mind.
I was drunk but I’d be sober again and the
resolution would stay behind when the liquor
died.

I don’t often get these fits of decision but
when they come they’re valid enough and I
knew this one was serious. That was a
turning point in the career of Jerry Cort-
land, there in the moonlight on the checkered
pavement.

What happened at the mouth of that
alley I’ll never really know. Fortunately
for me I couldn’t see or realize it clearly,
being drunk.

It sprang from the deep shadow and put
out two arms at me. That much I’m sure
of. Two arms that never touched me. They
never meant to. They shot past my ears, and
I heard a thin hissing noise and something
seemed to turn over in my mind, leisurely,
like a deep-buried thought stirring to life.
I could all but feel it move.

I touched it.

I wish I hadn’t. But I was thinking of my
money. My hand closed on the thing — on a
part of it — no one will ever know on just
what. I can only tell you it was smooth with
a smoothness that burned my hand. Friction
burned it, I think now. The sheer velocity
of the thing, though it was not then moving
perceptibly, took a neat thin layer of cuticle
off my palm wherever it touched. I think it
slid out of my grip on a thin lubrication of
my own skin.

You know how it is when you touch some-
thing white-hot? For an instant it niay feel
cold. I didn’t know I was burned. I closed
my hand hard on the — on whatever it was

I had hold of. And the very pressure of the
grip seemed to push it away, out of my hand,
very smooth and fast. All I know is that a
moment later I stood there, shaking my hand
because it stung and watching something
dark in the moonlight vanish down the street
with a motion that frightened me.

I was too dazed to shout By the time
my wits came back it had disappeared and
the feeling of unreality it left behind made
me doubt whether I had ever seen or felt it
at all.

About ten minutes later I found my money
was gone.

S O IT wasn’t a turning point in my life,
after all. If things had worked out
any differently I never would have met Ira
De Kalb. I never would have got myself
mixed up in that series of deaths which so
far as I was concerned were only signposts
pointing the way to De Kalb. Maybe it was
a turning point, at that.

The mind as well as the senses can be
awfully slow sometimes. The hand doesn’t
know it has been burned, the mind can’t
recognize the impossible when it confronts
it. There are many little refuges for a mind
that must not admit to itself the impossible
has happened.

I went back to my hotel that night and got
into bed. I had met a thief, I told myself
drowsily, as I’d deserved — walking a city
street that late at night, loaded down with
cash. I had it coming. He’d got my money
and that was that. (He — it — hadn’t touched
the money, or me, except in that one brief
unbalanced instant. The thing was im-
possible. But since it had happened, then
it was possible and the mind could dismiss
it.) I went to sleep.

And woke at dawn to the most extraordi-
nary experience I’d ever had in my life, up
to then. Even that encounter on the Rua
d’Ouvidor hadn’t beejf like this.

The experience was pure sensation. And
the sensation was somewhere inside me,
vaguely in the solar plexus region — a sound-
less explosion of pure energy like a dazzling
sun coming into sudden, radiant being.
There aren’t any accurate words to tell
about it.

But I was aware of ring after ring of
glowing vitality bursting outward from that
nova in the deepest nerve-center of my body.
For a timeless instant I lay there, bathed in
it, feeling it pour like a new kind of blood

THE TIME AXIS

through my veins. In that instant I knew
what it was.

Then somebody turned off the power at
its source.

I sat up abruptly, empty of the radiance,
empty as if it had never happened, but filled
terribly with the knowledge of what had
caused it.

My head ached from the sudden motion.
Dawn made the sky light outside and brim-
med the room with a clear gray luminous
pallor. I sat there holding my head in both
hands and knowing — knowing — that some-
where in the city an instant ago a man had
been killed.

There was no shadow of doubt in my
mind. I was as sure as if I had had that
strange sensation a hundred times before
and each time seen a man die as it burst into
a nova-glow inside me.

I wanted to go back to sleep and pretend
it had been a dream. But I knew I couldn’t.
I dragged myself out of bed and into my
clothes. I took my aching head and jangled
nerves down into the street and found a
yawning taxi-driver.

You see, I even knew where the dead
man would be found. It was unthinkable
that I should go there looking for him — but
I went. And I found him. He was lying
huddled against the rim of a fountain in a
little square not far from the place where I’d
last seen my — my thief — of the night before
vanishing with that disquieting, smooth
swiftness in the moonlight.

The dead man was an Indian, probably a
beggar. I stood there in the deserted square,
looking down at him, hearing the early
morning traffic moving noisily past, knowing
someone would find us here together at any
moment. I had never seen a victim of the
bum-death before but I knew I looked at one
now. It wasn’t a real bum, properly speak-
ing. Friction, I thought, had done it. The
eroded skin made me think of something,
and I looked at my own palm.

I was standing there, staring from my
burned hand to the dead man and then back
again, when — it happened again.

The bursting nova of pure radiance flared
into violence somewhere near the pit of my
stomach. Vitality poured through my
veins. . . .

I sold the series to AP as usual. There
had been five of the murders in Rio before
I got my idea about putting an end to them
and by then the stories had begun to hit

17

the States papers, some of them running my
picture along with the sensational stuff about
the deaths, and my uncanny ability at locat-
ing the bodies.

Looking back now, I suppose the only
reason they didn’t arrest me for murder was
that they couldn’t figure out how I’d done it
Luckily my hand had healed before the police
and the papers began to connect me so tight-
ly with the deaths.

After the fifth murder I got a reservation
for New York. I had come to the conclusion
that if I left Rio the murders would stop —
in Rio. I thought they might begin again in
New York. I had to find out, you see. By
then I was in pretty bad shape, for the best
of reasons— or the worst. Anyhow, I went
back.

CHAPTER II
The Stain and the Stone

T HERE was a message waiting for me
at the airport. Robert J. Allister wanted
to see me. I felt impressed. Allister runs
a chain of news and picture magazines sec-
ond only to Life and Time.

I phoned for an appointment, and they
told me to come right up. I walked through
a waiting-room full of people with prior
appointments and they passed me right into
the sanctum, with no preliminaries. I began
to wonder if I’d been underestimating my
own importance all these years.

Allister himself rose behind his desk and
offered me his hand. I waded forward,
ankle-deep through Persian carpets, and
took it. He told me to sit down. His voice
was tired and he looked thinner and more
haggard than his pictures.

“'So you’re Jerry Cortland,” he said.
“Been following your Rio stuff. Nice work.
Care to drop it for awhile?”

I gaped. He gave me a tired grin.

“I’d like you to work for me on contract,”
he said. “Let me explain. You know Ha
De Kalb?”

“The poor man’s Einstein?”

“In a way, maybe. He’s a dilettante. He’s
a genius, really, I suppose. A mind like a
grasshopper. He’ll work out a whole new
concept of mathematics and never bother to
apply it. He — well, you’ll understand better

18 STARTLING STORIES

after you’ve met him. He’s onto something
very new, just now. Something very im-
portant. I want some pieces written on it
and De Kalb made a point of asking for
you,”

“But why?”

“He has his reasons. He’ll explain to
you — maybe. I can’t.” He pushed the con-
tract toward me. “How about it?”

“Well — ” I hesitated. My ex-wife had
just slapped another summons on me, ali-
mony again, and I could certainly use some
money. “I’ll try it,” I said. “But I’m irre-
sponsible. Maybe I won’t stick to it.”

“You’ll stick,” Allister said grimly, “once
you’ve talked to De Kalb. That I can
guarantee. Sign here.”

De Kalb’s house blended into the hillside
as if Frank Lloyd Wright had built it with
his own hands, I was out of breath by the
time I got to the top of the gray stone ter-
races linked together by gray stone steps.
A maid let me in and showed me to a room
where I could wait.

“Mr. De Kalb is expecting you,” she
said. “He’ll be back in about ten minutes.”

Half the room was glass, looking out upon
miles and miles of Appalachians, tumbled
brown and green, with a dazzling sky above.
There was somebody already there, ap-
parently waiting too. I saw the outlines of
a woman’s spare, straight figure rising al-
most apologetically from a desk as I entered.
I knew her by that air of faint apology no
less than by her outline against the light.

“Dr. Essen!” I said. And I was aware
then of my first feeling of respect for this
job, whatever it was. You don’t get two
people like Letta Essen and Ira De Kalb
under the same roof for anything trivial.

I knew Dr. Essen. I’d interviewed her
twice, right after Hiroshima, about the work
she’d done with Meitner and Frisch in
establishing the nuclear liquid-drop concept
of atomic fission, I wanted very much to
ask her what she was doing here but I didn’t.
I knew I’d get more out of her if I let it
come her way.

“Mr. De Kalb asked me to meet you, Mr.
Cortland,” she said in her pleasant soft voice.
“Hello, It’s nice to see you again. You’ve
been having quite a time in Rio, haven’t
you ?”

“Old stuff now,” ' I said. “This looks
promising, if you’re in on it. What’s up,
anyhow ? ”

She gave me that shy smile again. She

had a tired gentle face, gray curls cut very
short, gray eyes like two flashes of light off
a steel beam when she let you meet her
direct gaze. Mostly she was too shy. But
when you caught that rare quick glance of
hers it was almost frightening. You realized
then tlie hard dazzling mind behind the eyes.

“I’ll let Mr. De Kalb tell you all about
that,” she said. “It isn’t my secret. But
you’re involved more than you know. In
fact — ” She paused, not looking at me, but
giving the corner of the carpet a gentle
scowl. “In fact, I’d like to show you some-
thing. We’ve got a little time to spare, and
I want your reaction to — to something.
Come with me and we’ll see.”

I followed her out into the hall, down a
flight of steps and then into a big room,
comfortably furnished. A study, I thought.
But the bookshelves were empty now and
everything was lightly filmed with dust.

“The fireplace, Mr. Cortland,” Dr. Essen
said, pointing.

I T WAS an ordinary fireplace, gray stone
in the pine-panelled wall, with a gray
stone hearth. But there seemed to be a stain
at one spot on the hearth, close to the wall.
I stepped closer. Then I knelt to look.

The speed of a chain of thoughts comes
as close as anything I know to annihilating
time itself. The images that flashed through
my mind seemed to come all at once.

I saw the stain. I thought — transmutation.
There was no overt reason but I thought it.
And then before I could take it in clearly
with my conscious mind, in the chambers of
the unconscious I was standing again at the
alley mouth in Rio at three in the morning,
seeing a dark thing leap forward at me with
its two hands outstretched.

I heard the thin humming in my ears,
felt the burning of its touch. I remembered
the sunburst of violent energy deep inside
me that had heralded murder whenever it
came. And I knew that all these were one
— all these and the stain upon the hearth.
The knowledge came unbidden, without
reason. But it was sure.

I didn’t question it. But I looked very
closely at the stone. That stain was an
irregular area where the stone seemed
changed into another substance. I didn’t
know what the substance was. It looked
wholly unfamiliar. The gray of the hearth
stopped abruptly, along an irregular pattern,
and gave place to a substance that seemed

19

THE TIME AXIS

translucent, shot through with veins and
striae that were lighter, like the veins in
marble.

The pine panels beside the fireplace were
partly stained like the stone and a little area
of the carpet that came up to the edge of
the hearth. Wood, stone and cloth alike had
turned into this — this marble stain. The
veins in it were like tangled hair, curling
together, embedded like some strange neural
structure in half-transparent flesh.

I looked up.

“Don’t touch it,” Dr. Essen said quickly.

I didn’t mean to. I didn’t need to. I knew
what it would feel like. I knew that though
it was perfectly motionless it would burn
my hand with friction if I touched it. Dr.
Essen knew too. I saw that in her face.

I stood up. “What is it?” I asked, my
voice sounding oddly thin.

“The nekron,” she told me, almost absent-
ly. She was searching my face and the keen-
ness of her gaze was almost painful to meet.
“That’s Mr. De Kalb’s word for it. As good
a word as any. It’s — a new type of matter.
Mr. Cortland — you have seen something
like this before?" Her rare, direct look was
like the sharpness of a knife going through
me, cold and deep.

“Maybe,” I said. “No, never, really.
But—”

“All right, I understand,” She nodded.
“I wanted to verify something. I’ve verified
it. Thank you.” She turned away toward
the door. “We’d better get back. No,
please — no questions yet. I can’t possibly
explain until after you’ve seen the Record.”

“The Record? What—”

“It’s something that was dug up in Crete.
It’s — peculiar. But thoroughly convincing.
You’ll see it soon. Shall we go back?”

She locked the door behind us.

Certainly De Kalb didn’t look his forty-
seven years any more than a Greek statue
does. He looked like a young man, big and
well proportioned. His sleek hair lay flat
and short upon his head, and his face was
handsome in the vacant way the Belvedere’s
is.

There was no latent expression upon it
and you felt that no emotions had ever
drawn lines about the mouth or between the
brows. Either he had never felt any or his
control was such that he could suppress all
feeling. There was the same placidity you
see in the face of Buddha.

There was something odd about his eyes

The box opened like a flower that had as
many facets as a jewel (CHAP. II)

STARTLING STORIES

20

— I couldn’t make out their color. They
seemed to be filmed as though with a cat’s
third eyelid. Light blue, I thought, or gray,
and curiously dull.

H E GAVE me a strong handshake and
collapsed into an overstaffed chair,
hoisted his feet to a hassock. Grunting, he
blinked at me with his dull stare. There
was a curious clumsiness to his motions, and
when he spoke, a curious ponderous quality
in his diction. He seemed to feel something
like indulgent contempt for the rest of the
world. It was all right, I suppose. Nobody
had better reason. The man was a genius.

“Glad you’re here, Mr. Cortland, ” he said
hoarsely. “I need you. Not for your intelli-
gence, which is slight. Not for your physical
abilities, obviously sapped by years of waste-
ful and juvenile dissipation. But I have an
excellent reason to think we may work well
together.”

“I was sent to get an interview for
Spread,” I told him.

“You were not.” De Kalb raised a fore-
finger. “You err through ignorance, sir.
Robert Allister, the publisher of Spread, is
a friend of mine. He has money. He has
agreed to do the world and me a service.
You are under contract to him, so you do
as he says. He says you will work with
me. Is that clear?”

“Lucid,” I told him. “Except I don’t
work that way. The contract says I’m to
handle news assignments. I read the fine
print too. There was no mention of
peonage.”

“This is a news assignment. I shall give
you an interview. But first, the Record. I
see no point in futile discussion. Dr. Essen,
will you be kind enough — ” He nodded
toward a cupboard.

She got out a parcel wrapped in cloth,
handed it to De Kalb. He held it on his
knee, unopened, tapped his fingers on its
top. It was about the size and shape of a
portable typewriter case.

“I have showed the contents of this,” he
said, “only to Dr. Essen. And — ”

“I am convinced,” Dr. Essen said dryly.
“Oh yes, Ira. I am convinced!”

“Now I show it to you,” De Kalb said
and held out the package. “Put it on the
table — so. Now draw up a chair. Remove
the wrappings. Excellent. And now — ”
They were both leaning forward, watching
me expectantly. I glanced from them to

the battered box, then back again. It was
a tarnished blue-white rectangle, battered,
smudged with dirt, perfectly plain.

"It is of no known metal,” De Kalb said.
“Some alloy, I think. It was found fifteen
years ago in an excavation in Crete and
sent to me unopened. Not intentionally.
Nobody has ever been able to open it until
recently. It is, as you may have guessed, a
puzzle box. It took me fourteen years to
learn the trick that would unlock it. It is
also apparently indestructible. I shall now
perform the trick for you.”

His hands moved upon the battered sur-
face. I saw his nails whiten now and then
as he put pressure on it.

“Now,” he said. “It opens. But I shall
not watch. Letta, will you ? No, I think it
will be better for us both if we look away
while Mr. Cortland — ”

I stopped listening along about then. For
the box was slowly opening.

It opened like a jewel. Or like an un-
folding flower that had as many facets as a
jewel. I had expected a lid to lift but nothing
of the sort happened. There was movement.
There were facets and planes sliding and
shifting and turning as though hinged, but
what had seemed to be a box changed and
reassembled and unfolded before me until it
was — what ? As much as jewel as anything.
Angles, planes, a shape and a shining.

Simultaneously there was motion in my
own mind. As a tuning fork responds to a
struck note, so something like a vibration
bridged the gap between the box and my
brain. As a book opens, as leaves tarn, a
book opened and leaves turned in my mind.

All time compressed itself into that blind-
ing second. There was a shifting reorienta-
tion, motions infinitely fast that fitted and
meshed with such precision the book and
my mind were one.

The Record opened itself inside my brain.
Complete, whole, a history and a vision, it
hung for that one instant lucid and detailed
in my mind. And for that moment outside
time I did comprehend. But the mind could
not retain it all. It flashed out and burned
along my nerves and then it faded and was
only a pulse, a glimpse, hanging on like an
after-image in my memory. I had seen —
and forgotten.

But I had not forgotten everything.

Across a gulf of inconceivable eons a Face
looked at me from red sky and empty earth.
The Face of Ea. . . .

THE TIME AXIS 21

The room spun around me.

“Here,” Dr. Essen’s voice murmured at
my shoulder. I looked up dizzily, took the
glass of brandy she offered. I’m not sure
now whether or not I had a moment of
unconsciousness. I know my eyes blurred
and the room tilted before me. I drank the
brandy gratefully.

CHAPTER III
The Vision of Time

D E KALB said, “Tell us what you saw.”
“You — you’ve seen it too?” The
brandy helped but I wasn’t yet steady. I
didn’t want to talk about what had flashed
through my mind in that unending, dissolving
glimpse which was slipping fragment by
fragment out of my memory as I sat there.
And yet I did want to talk.

“I’ve seen it.” De Kalb’s ponderous nod
was grim. “Letta Essen has seen it. Now
you. Three of us. We all get the same thing
and yet — details differ. Three witnesses to
the same scene tell three different stories.
Each sees with a different brain. Tell us
how it seemed to you.”

I swirled the brandy around in my glass.
My thoughts swirled with it, hot and potent
as the liquor and as volatile. Give me ten
minutes more, I thought, and they’ll
evaporate.

“Red sky,” I said slowly. “Empty land-
scape. And — ” The word stuck in my
throat. I couldn’t name it.

“The Face,” De Kalb supplied impatient-
ly. “Yes, I know. Go on.”

“The Face of Ea,” I said. “How do I
know its name ? Ea and time — time — ”
Suddenly the brandy splashed across my
hand. I was shaking with reaction so violent
I could not control it and I was shaking be-
cause of time. I got the glass to my lips,
using both hands, and drained what was
left.

The second reaction passed and I thought
I had myself under control.

“Time,” I said deliberately, . letting the
thought of it pour through my mind in a
long, cold, dark-colored tide that had no
motion. Time hasn’t, of course. But when
you see it as I did, at first the concept makes
the brain rock in ypur skull.

“Time — ahead of our time. Uncountable
thousands of years in our future. It was all
there, wasn’t it ? The civilizations rising
and falling one after another until — the last
city of all. The City of the Face.”

“You saw it was a city?” De Kalb leaned
forward quickly. “That’s good. That’s very
good. It took me three times to find that
out.”

“I didn’t see it. I — I just knew.”

I closed my eyes. Before me the empty
landscape floated, dark, almost night, under
the dim red sky.

I knew the Face was enormous. The side
of some mountain had been carved away
to reveal it and, I supposed, carved with
tools by human hands. But you had the
feeling that the Face must always have been
there, that one day it had wakened in the
rock and given one great grimace of im-
patience and the mountainside had sloughed
away from its features, leaving Ea to look
out into eternity over the red night of the
world.

“There are people inside,” I said. “I
could feel them, being there. Feel their
thoughts, I suppose. People in an enormous
city, a metropolis behind the Face.”

“Not a metropolis,” De Kalb said. “A
nekropolis. There’s a difference. But — yes,
it’s a city.”

“Streets,” I said dreamily, sniffing the
empty glass. “Levels of homes and public
buildings. People moving, living, thinking.
What do you mean, nekropolis?”

“Tell you later. Go on.”

“I wish I could. It’s fading.” I closed my
eyes again, thinking of the Face. I had to
force my mind to turn around in its tracks
and look, for it didn’t want to confront that
infinite complexity again. The Face was
painful to see. It was too intricate, too in-
volved with emotions complex beyond our
grasp. It was painful for the mind to think
of it, straining to understand the inscrutable
things that experience had etched upon those
mountain-high features.

“Is it a portrait?” I asked suddenly. “Or
a composite? What is the Face?”

“A city,” De Kalb said. “A nation. The
ultimate in human destiny — and a call for
help. And much more that we’ll never
understand.”

“But — the future!” I said. “That box —
didn’t you say it was found in Crete? Dug
up in old ruins ? How could something from
the past be a record of our own future? It

doesn't make sense."

“Very little makes sense, sir, when you
come to examine the nature of time.” De
Kalb’s voice was ponderous again. He
heaved himself up a little and folded his thick
fingers, looking at me above them with
veiled gray eyes.

“Have you read Spengler, Mr. Cort-
land?” he asked.

I grimaced and nodded.

“I know, I know. He has a high irritant
value. But the man had genius, just the
same. His concept of the community, mov-
ing through its course from ‘culture’ to dead
and petrifying ‘civilization’ is what happened'
to the city of the Face.

“I said ‘happened’ because I have to use
the past tense for that nekropolis of the
future. It exists. It has accomplished itself
in time as fully as Babylon or Rome. And
the men in it are not men at all in the sense
we know. They are gods.”

"They are gods,” he went on. “Spengler
was wrong, of course, in thinking of any
human progress in one simple, romantic
curve. You have only to compare four-
teenth century Rome with sixteenth century
Rome to see that a nekropolis, as Mumford
calls it, can pull itself together and become
a metropolis again, a Kving, vital unit in
human culture.

“I have no quarrel with Spengler in his

H E LOOKED at me as if he expected
me to object. I said nothing.

Perhaps it was a dream in which the waters of time parted abeoe as

22

The command of the eyes were
irresistible, and the command
was— Sleep (CHAP. XXIII)

interpretations of a culture within itself.
But both he and Toynbee went astray in their
ideas of the symbolic value of a city. When
you go further into the Record you’ll see
what I mean.”

He paused, put out a large hand and
fumbled in a dish of fruit on the table at his
elbow. He found an orange and peered at
it dubiously, hefted it once or twice, then
closed his fingers over it and went on with

23

his discourse.

“In a moment,” he said, “I want to show
you something with this orange as an illus-
tration. First, however, I must do Spengler
the justice of allowing the validity of his
theories, in the ultimate. The City of the
Face has run its course. It is a nekropolis,
in the sense that Mumford uses the term.

“In our times, a nekropolis such as Rome
once was, and such as New York must be
someday, needn’t mean the end of our civili-
zation, because a city isn’t a whole nation.
There were outlying villages that flourished
all the better when Rome ceased to dominate
their world. When the dark ages closed over
Europe it wasn’t by any means the end of
the civilized world — elsewhere on the planet
new cultures were rising and old ones flour-
ishing.

“But the City of the Face is a very diff-
erent matter.

“That City is really Nekropolis and there
are no outlying villages to carry on, no out-
lying cultures rising toward fruition. In all

STARTLING STORIES

24

that world there is only the one great City
where mankind survives. And they aren’t
men — they are gods. Gods, sir!”

“Then it can’t really be a nekropolis,” I
objected.

“It need not be. That’s up to us.”

“How?”

“You saw my hearth. Dr. Essen showed
you the stain of plague that is creeping
across it. Oh yes, my friend, that stain is
spreading ! Slowly, but with a rate of growth
that increases as it goes. The negative mat-
ter — no, not even negative. Not even that.
But it happened to the world of the Face.
That whole planet is nekronic matter except
for the City itself.

“You didn’t sense that from your first
experience with the Record ? No? You will.
The people in the City can’t save themselves
by direct action on the world around them.
They appeal to us. We can save them. I
don’t yet know how. But they know or they
wouldn't have appealed in just the way they
did.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Let me get
this straight. You’re asking me to accept a
lot, you know. The only premise I’ve got to
believe in is the — the Record, But what do
you want from me, personally? How do I
come into it? Why me?”

D E KALB shifted in his chair, sighed
heavily, opened his fingers and peered
at the orange he held as if he had never seen
it before. He grimaced.

“Sir, you’re right. I accept the rebuke.
Let me give you facts. Item, the Record. It
is, in effect, a book. But not a book made
by human minds. And it must, as you know,
be experienced, not read. Each time you
open the box you will get the same flash of
complete vision, and each time you will for-
get a little less as your mind is conditioned.
But there will always be facets of that tre-
mendous story which will elude us, I think.
Our minds can never wholly grasp what lies
inside that box. . . .

“It was found in Crete. It had lain there
perhaps three thousand years, perhaps five
thousand — I think, myself, a million. It came
into my hands half by accident. I could not
open it. Off and on I tried. That is my
habit. I used X-rays to look through the
substance of the box. Of course I saw noth-
ing.

“I detected radioactivity, and I tested it
with certain of the radio-elements. I ex-

posed it to supersonics. I — well, I tried
many things. Something worked. Some-
thing clicked the safety, so that one day it
opened. You see — ” He looked at me
gravely. “You see, it was time.”

“Time?”

“That box was made with a purpose,
obviously. It was sent to us, with a message.
I say to us but the aim was less direct. It
was sent through time, Mr. Cortland' —
through time itself — and the address said
simply, ‘To be opened only by a skilled tech-
nological civilization.’ ”

“All right,” I said. “Suppose it came
through time. Suppose it’s an appeal for
help. I didn’t get that, but I’m willing to
believe I might if I opened the box often
enough. But why do you assume this is a
living issue, here and now? You imply the
fate of the City depends on us. If that box
is as old as you say, isn’t it more likely the
City of the Face existed somewhere in the
prehistoric past?

“They made a record — I can’t deny that.
They cast it adrift in time like a note in a
bottle and it floated ashore here and we read
it. Sure. But it makes a good enough news-
story for me the logical way — a relic of a
dead civilization a million years old. That
I could write. But — ”

“You are not here to write a news story,
sir !” De Kalb’s voice was sharp.

“That’s what my contract says I’m here
for.”

“You were chosen,” De Kalb said heavily.
“You were chosen. Not by Allister. Not
by me.” He shifted uneasily. “Let me go
on a little.” He peered at the orange, tossed
it up and caught it with a smack in his palm.
“I opened the box for the first time,” he
said, “in my studio.

“You’ve seen it. I saw the box unfolding
like a flower. For the first time in a million
years — opening up in four dimensions, or
perhaps more than four, with that tesseract
motion which the eye can only partly see.
But that first time, sir— something more
happened.” He paused, hesitated, said in
a reluctant voice, “Something came out of
the box.”

I waited. Dr. Essen, who had scarcely
moved since this talk began, got up abruptly
and went to stand at the window, her back
to us,- looking out over the great brown
tumble of mountains beyond.

“It came out of the box,” De Kalb said
in a rapid voice, as if he didn’t want to talk

THE TIME AXIS

about this and was determined to get it over
as fast as he could. “It passed me. It leaped
toward the fireplace. And it was gone.
When I looked, I saw nothing. But that
evening I noticed the first spot of the stain
upon the stone. In the stone. It meant little
to me then — I had not yet learned enough
from the Record to be afraid. But I know
now.”

CHAPTER IV
The Laurentian Story

A GAIN I waited. This time I had to
prompt him.

“Know what?”

“The nekron,” he said. “It’s growing.
It will never stop growing, until — He
paused, shrugged. “We have to believe
they’re in the future,” he said. “We have
to help them. They made sure of that. For
unless we do the nekron will grow and grow
until our world is like theirs — dead matter.
Inert. Nekronic. I call it that because it is
death.

“An absolutely new form of matter, the
death of energy. It breaks a supreme law
of our universe, the law of increasing en-
tropy. Entropy trends toward chaos,
naturally. But the nekron is the other ex-
treme, a pattern, a dead null-energy pattern
of negation.”

“You mean,” I demanded, “that the peo-
ple of the City deliberately set a trap for the
man who first opened the box?”

“They had to. They had to make sure
we’d answer their appeal to save ourselves.”
“Then you’re convinced they exist in the
future, not the past?”

“You saw the Face. You were aware, you
say, of the waves of civilization rising and
falling between our time and theirs? How
can you doubt it, then, Mr. Cortland?”

I was silent, remembering.

“It doesn’t matter,” De Kalb went on.
“That question is purely academic. Past or
future is all one in the time-fabric you will
understand better after you’ve opened the
box again.”

“But,” I said, “how can we help them? If
they can’t destroy the menace to their own
world, whatever it is, how could we? It’s
ridiculous. And anyhow, if time-travel was

25

possible for the box — which I don’t for a
moment really accept — how could it be pos-
sible for tangible, living men from our time ?
And if it were, how could you be sure you
weren’t dashing off to save a city that would
prove when you found it to be already dead?
Overwhelmed a million years ago? How is
it—”

“No, no, Mr. Cortland!” De Kalb held
up a large hand with an orange balanced on
its palm. “You have so much to learn!
Allow me the intelligence to think of those
objections myself! Surely you don't imagine
all that hadn’t occurred to me already?

“The answer is that the nekron can be
destroyed — or at least that the problem it
poses can be solved. I believe it can be
solved only by this method — three men and
one woman must go into the future age that
hold the Face of Ea. For that, apparently,
was the original plan of the people of the
Face.”

“What makes you so certain of that?”

“A number of factors. The Record was
sent to our civilization, remember?”

I had him there. “But it was found in
Cretan ruins, you said.”

“Certainly. And the ancient Minoans
didn't open it. I suspect the Record existed
long before the time of Theseus — but it re-
mained unopened until a neotechnical civili-
zation had developed on this planet. Only
men — and women — who were products of
such a culture would have the qualities
necessary to solve the nekronic problem.”
“Why didn’t they send the Record directly
to our era? Why did they miss the right
time by thousands of years?”

“I am no expert in the specialized restric-
tions of time-traveling,” De Kalb said, with
some irritation. “It may be that too-accurate
aim is impossible. How can I tell that?
The Record reached the right hands. I can
easily prove that.”

UT I was searching for errata. “You
said we’d have the qualities that could
solve the nekronic problem — destroy it, I
suppose you mean. Well? Have you solved
it?”

De Kalb lost his ill-temper and beamed
at me. “No,” he said. “Not yet. The
nekronic matter itself is very curious —
atypical, completely. It is absolutely non-
reactive. It has no spectrum. It emits no
energy. No known reagent affects it in the
slightest degree. It is a new type of matter,

STARTLING STORIES

26

plain and simple. I cannot destroy it — not
yet: Not now. But I believe I can do it with
the guidance and aid of the people of the
Face. As a matter of — ”

The telephone on the table beside him
buzzed sharply. Dr. Essen swung around
with a start. De Kalb grunted, nodded at
her, muttered, “I’m afraid so,” as if in
answer to a question and took up the tele-
phone with his free hand.

It sputtered at him.

“All right, put him on,” De Kalb said in
a resigned voice. The receiver buzzed and
sputtered again. De Kalb’s placid features
grimaced, smoothed out, grimaced again.
“Now Murray,” he said. “Now, Murray —
no, wait a minute ! Confound it, Murray,
allow me to — I know you are, but — ”

The telephone would not let him speak.
It crackled angrily, a word now and then
coming out clearly. De Kalb listened in
resigned silence. Finally he heaved himself
up in the chair and spoke with sudden
resolution.

“Murray,” he said sharply, “Murray,
listen to me. Cortland’s here.”

The phone crackled. De Kalb grinned.
“I know you don’t,” he said. “Probably
Cortland doesn’t like you either. That's not
important. Murray, can you come up here?
Yes, it is important. I have something to
show you.” He hesitated, glanced at Dr.
Essen, shrugged. “I am casting the die,
Murray,” he said. “I want to show you a
certain box.”

“You know Colonel Harrison Murray?”
De Kalb asked. I nodded. I knew and dis-
liked him for personal qualities quite apart
from his ability. He was old army, West
Point, a martinet. He had the violent, un-
controlled emotions of an hysterical woman
and the mechanical brilliance of a — well, a
robot.

No one could deny his genius. He prided
himself on being scrupulously just, which he
wasn’t. But he thought he was. A fine tech-
nician, a genius at strategy and tactics. He
confirmed that in the Pacific, back in ’45.
I’d done a profile on him once and he hadn’t
liked it at all.

“You’re taking him in on this?” I asked.

“I’ve got to. He can make it too hot for
me unless he understands. You see, I’ve
been working with him on— never mind.
But he insists I go on with it. He can’t see
how important this new business is.”

“Tra_” Dr. Essen out in timidlv. “Ira. do

you really think it’s wise? To. bring the
colonel in yet, I mean. Are you sure?”

“You know I’m not, Letta.” He frowned.
“But there’s so little time to be lost, now.
I don’t dare wait any longer. Mr. Cortland
— ” He swung, around toward me— “Mr.
Cortland, I see it is now time to give you one
more bit of knowledge. I have a story to
.tell you, about myself and you. Surely you
must have realized by now that you are in-
volved in this thing far beyond any power
of mine to accept or dismiss.”

S NODDED. I did know that. I thought
briefly of the things that had happened
to me in Rio, of the affinity I had sensed
without understanding between that stain on
the hearthstone and the — the creature which
had scorched my hand in Rio and the deaths
that had come after. Would they stop now
— in Rio? Would they begin again, nearer
home? There had to be some connection —
coincidence just doesn’t stretch that far.
But all I could do was wait.

“This is my story,” De Kalb said. “Our
story, Mr. Cortland. Yours and mine, Dr.
Essen’s — perhaps Colonel Murray’s too. I
don’t know. I wish I did. Well, I’ll get on
with it.” He sighed heavily. “After I had
experienced the Record many times,” he
said, “I began to realize that there was in it
reference to a certain spot on the earth’s
surface that had a rather mystifying im-
portance.

“I was unable to grasp why. The place
was localized by latitude, longitude, various
methods of cross-reference. It took me a
long while to work it out in terms of our
own world and era and decimal system.
But finally I did it.

“I went there.” He paused, regarding me
gravely. “Have you ever been in the Laur-
entians, Mr. Cortland? Do you know the
wildness of those mountains? So near here
by air, and so far off in another world, once
you arrive and the sound of your motor
ceases. You imagine then that you can hear
the silences of the arctic wastes, which are
all that lie beyond that band of northern
forests.

“Well, I hired men. I sank a shaft. They
thought I was simply a prospector with more
money and fewer brains than most. Fortun-
ately they didn’t know my real reason — that
the spot I was hunting had turned out to
be underground. You get some curious
superstitions up there in the wilds — perhaps

27

THE TIME AXIS

not curious. In many ways they’re wise
men. But my spot, in this era at least, had to
be dug for.

“My instruments showed me a disturbance
toward which the shaft was angled. And
eventually we oame to the source of that dis-
turbance. We found it. We hollowed a cav-
ern around it. After that I dismissed the
men and settled down to study the thing I
had found.” He laughed abruptly.

“It was twenty feet of nothing, Mr. Cort-
land. An oval of disturbance, egg-shaped,
cloudy to tire eye. I could walk through it.
But inside that oval space and matter were
walled off from our own space and matter
by a barrier that was, I know now, supra-
dimensional. A man may move from light
to dark, encountering no barrier — yet the
difference is manifest. There were tremen-
dous differences here.

“Also there was something inside. I was
convinced of that long before I got my first
glimpse of it. I tried many things. It was
finally under a bombardment of UV that I
saw the first shadowy shape inside that noth-
ingness. I increased the power, I decreased
it, I played with the vernier like a violinist
on a Stradivarius.

“I chased that elusive mystery up and
down through the light bands like a cat on
a mouse’s trail. And at last, quite clearly, I
saw — ” He broke off, grinning at me.

“No, I shall not tell you yet what I saw,”
he said. “You wouldn’t believe me. The
moment has now come, Mr. Cortland, when
I must give you a Kttle lesson on the nature
of time.” He held up the orange, revolving
it slowly between his fingers.

“A sphere,” he said, “revolving on an
axis. Call it the earth.”

He put out his other hand and took up
from the fruit bowl a silver knife with a leaf-
shaped blade a little broader than the orange.
With great deliberation he slid the edge
through the rind.

CHAPTER V
The Death Carriers

W HAT happened then came totally
without warning. In one moment
I sat comfortably in my chair watching De
Kalb draw the knife-blade through the

orange. In the next —

A blinding nova of pure energy exploded
outward from a nexus in the center of my
body.

The room ceased to be. De Kalb and Dr.
Essen were unrealities far off at the periph-
ery of that exploding nova. Vitality ran like
fire through every nerve and vein, like an
adrenaline charge inconceivably magnified.
There was nothing in the world for one
timeless moment but the bursting glow of
that experience for which I have no name.

The first thing I saw when the room came
back into focus around me was the blood
running from De Kalb’s hand.

It meant nothing to me, in that first in-
stant. Blood is the natural noncomitant of
death and I knew that somewhere not far
away a man had died a moment before.
Then my senses came back and I sat up
abruptly, staring at DeKalb’s face.

The color had drained out of it. He was
looking at his cut hand with a blank unsee-
ing gaze. There was a little blood on the
silver knife. It was nothing. He had only
cut himself slightly because of —

Because of —

Our eyes met. I think the knowledge
came simultaneously into our minds in that
meeting of glances. He had felt it too. The
explosion of white energy had burst outward
in his nerve centers in the same moment it
burst in mine. Neither of us spoke. It wasn’t
necessary.

After what seemed a long while I looked
at Dr. Essen. That bright steel glance of
hers met mine squarely but there was only
bewilderment in it.

“What happened?” she asked.

The sound of her voice seemed to release
us both from our speechlessness.

“You don’t know?” De Kalb swung
around to look at her. “No, evidently you
don’t. But Mr. Cortland and I — Cortland,
how often have you — ” He groped for
words.

“Since the first of the deaths in Rio,” I
said flatly. “You?”

“Since the first of them here. And evei
since, though very faintly, when they hap-
pened in Rio.”

“What are you talking about?” Dr. Essen
demanded..

Heavily, speaking with deliberation, De
. Kalb told her.

“For myself,” he finished, glancing at
me, “it began when I first opened the Rec-

STARTLING STORIES

28

ord.” He paused, looked at his hand with
some surprise and, laying down orange and
knife, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket
and wrapped it around the bleeding cut. “I
didn’t feel that at all,” he said, almost to
himself.

And then, to me, “I opened the Record. I
told you that — something — went by me very
fast and vanished at the spot where that
nekronic stain later came into existence.”
He looked at me soberly, his eyes narrowed.
“Mr. Cortland,” he said, “can you tell me
that you did not experience any feeling of
recognition when you first saw that stain on
the hearth?”

I got up so suddenly that my chair almost
tipped over. Violently I said, “De Kalb,
somewhere a man has just died ! Something
killed him. Something is making you and
me accessories to murder ! We’ve got to put
a stop to it! This isn’t an academic discus-
sion — it’s murder ! We — ”

“Sit down, Mr. Cortland, sit down.” De
Kalb’s voice was tired. “I know quite well
it’s murder. We must and will discover the
truth about it. But not by shouting at one
another. The truth lies in that box on the
table. It lies somewhere very far in the
future.

“Also, the truth is a being that roams our
world, murdering at will. I released it, Mr.
Cortland. Unwittingly, but I released it.
That was a Pandora box I opened. Trouble
and death came out of it. We can only pray
that there is hope in the bottom of it, as there
was in Pandora’s box.”

“Look,” I said. “Tell me how I can help
and I’ll do it. But let’s not have any more
generalities. I’m too close to these deaths.
I think I’m in personal danger. Maybe you
are too. What can we do?”

“We are not in personal danger from the
killer. From the law — perhaps — if this con-
nection from which we suffer were to become
known. What can we do ? I wish I could tell
you. I’m sure of this much — that thing
which came from the box, leaving the stain
of nekronic matter like a footprint behind it,
is a living and dangerous creature. It
touched me as it went by. I think by that
touch I’ve become — well, remotely akin to
it. Were you touched too?”

I told him.

“Very well,” he said. “We are in danger.
Has it occurred to you yet that where it
touched the hearthstone, the nekron took
root?”

F OR a moment I didn’t see what he
meant. Then the implication hit me and
I went cold and empty inside. De Kalb, see-
ing the look on my face, laughed shortly.

"I see it has. Very well. So far I haven’t
detected any sign of nekronic infection in
myself. I assume you haven’t either. But
that proves nothing.”

“Have you seen the creature?” I asked.
He hesitated. “I can’t be sure. I think
I have. Will you tell me exactly what hap-
pened to you, please ? Every detail, even the
irrelevant.”

And when I had finished, he exchanged
troubled glances with Dr. Letta Essen. “Di-
rective intelligence, then,” she said.

“The way it moved,” De Kalb murmured.
“That’s highly significant. And the impos-
sibility of getting a firm grip on the creature.
So — Letta, do you agree?”

“Frictional burns?” she asked. “But it
didn’t move fast enough to cause those. That
is — not spatially.”

“Not in space, no,” De Kalb said. “But
in time ? Limited, of course. A few seconds’
leeway would be enough if you consider the
energy expended and the tremendous veloci-
ties involved. It looks like a shadow — it
seems to have mass without weight — and it
has high velocity without spatial motion.

“And Mr. Cortland’s tightening his grip
on the creature seemed to push it away.
Time-movement, then ! It vibrates — it has
an oscillating period of existence, certainly
limited within a range of a few seconds. A
tuning-fork vibrates in space. Why not vi-
bration through time — with an extremely
narrow range?

“No wonder you couldn’t hold the crea-
ture ! Could you hold a metal rod vibrating
that rapidly? You would get frictional burns
on your hands — since your own weight
would prevent you from partaking of its mo-
tion. The being’s existence must be, to a
limited degree, extra-temporal.

“Consequently, I suppose any weapon
used against it would have to be keyed to
its own temporal periodicity. That is, if we
had a pistol oscillating in time, we might
be able to shoot the creature. But the hand
that squeezed the trigger might have to be
oscillating too.”

“Trembling like a leaf,” I said. “I know
mine would be.”

He brushed that away. “How intelligent
is this killer? Is ego Involved, or merely
vampirism? If the creature read your

THE TIME AXIS

mind — ” He grimaced. “No. No! The
missing factor is what the nekron itself is
and its special qualities. And we don’t know
that. We probably never will until we go to
the Face of Ea.”

I sighed. I sat down. I’d had too many
jolts in the past half hour to feel very sure of
myself.

“So we travel in time,” I said wearily
“Mr. De Kalb — you’re crazy.”

He had enough energy left to chuckle
rather wanly.

“You’ll think me even crazier, sir, when
I tell you what it was I saw down there
under the mountain, in the cavern. But I
must finish my demonstration before you’ll
be able to understand.”

“Get on with it, then.”

H E TOOK up orange and knife again.

He fitted the blade into the cut and
finished the job of bisecting the fruit a little
above its equator. The severed top half lay
upon the blade as on a narrow plate. Below
it he held the other half of the orange in
place, so that it still maintained its unbroken
sphere.

“Consider this blade Flatland,” he said.
“A world of two dimensions, intersecting the
three-dimensional sphere. Now if I revolve
the lower half of the orange, you will please
imagine that the upper half revolves with it.
One fruit — you see? The axis remains im-
movable in relation to the plane in Flatland
it intersects.

“Now. I cut this lower half again, straight
through. The same axis intersects the same
point on this Flatland. In other words, the
spatial axis remains stable. You understand
so far?”

“No,” I said. He grinned, tossed knife
and fruit back into the bowl.

29

“It takes thinking,” he said. “Let me go
on. Now time is also a sphere. Time re-
volves. And time has an axis — a single
stable extension of a temporal point, drawn
through past and future alike, intersecting
them all, as that knife-blade touched the
orange everywhere in the Flatland dimen-
sion. And that, Mr. Cortland, is what makes
travel in time theoretically valid.

“The theory of time-travel usually ignores
space. The traveler steps into some semi-
magical machine, presses a button and
emerges a thousand years in the future — but
on earth!” He snorted. “In a thousand
years, or a thousand days, or in one day, or
one minute, this planet along with the whole
solar system would have traveled far beyond
its position at the moment the traveler en-
tered his machine.

“But there is one point from which he
could enter the machine, enter time itself and
be sure always of emerging on earth. For
each planet, I think, there is one single point.
The spot in the Laurentians where I saw —
what I saw — was that point for our planet.
It is the spot at which the axis of the time-
sphere intersects our own three-dimensional
world. If it were possible to follow the line
of that particular axis you would move
through time.

“Well, I believe there is movement but
along still another dimension, beyond this
theoretical fourth which is time— -or super-
time. Call it a fifth. This much I’m sure of
— if you could stay in the time axis indefi-
nitely the ultra-time drift would carry you
into another era, through era beyond era,
wherever other ages intersect the time axis.”
He shook his head.

“I admit I don’t understand it too clearly.
It’s a science beyond ours. However, I think

[ Turn page]

THANKS 70 FAMOUS V

BROMO -SELTZER

Millions turn to Bromo-Seltzer
to relieve ordinary headache
three ways. It’s famous for giv-
ing fast, pleasant help. Caution:
Use only as directed. Get Bromo-
Seltzer at your drugstore
fountain or counter today, i
A product of Emerson li

WmMim, Drug Co, si ace 1887# II

STARTLING STORIES

30

I can explain the presence of the Record
box now. I believe the people of the Face
sent it back in a direction parallel to the
time-axis — which, remember, intersects the
same area in space always, at any given mo-
ment. They sent it very far back, millennia
into our past — as you say, like people tossing
a message in a bottle into the stream of
time.

“Look.” He held up his hand, thumb
and forefinger touching at the tips. “Two
times — my finger and thumb. But they
touch at one point only. There you can
cross. From the time of the Face to, let us
say, some thousands of years B.C. This is
vague again, and it is something I don’t un-
derstand.

“The extension is along still another di-
mension, possibly the ultra-sphere, this fig-
urative fifth. But it’s logical to suppose
there would be such a limitation. There is
in space. You can step spatially only into
areas spatially adjoining yours. And in
time — well, it may apply there too.”

“All right,” I said. “Okay up to now.
I’ll accept it. Now let’s have the kicker.
What was it you saw in your cave?”

E KALB leaned back in his chair, re-
garding me with a grin.

“I saw you, Mr. Cortland.”

I gaped at him.

His grin broadened.

“Yes, I saw you, lying asleep on the floor
of the — the egg. I saw myself there too,
asleep. I saw Dr. Essen. And lastly I saw
Colonel Harrison Murray.”

He looked at me with obscure triumph, his
grin very wide.

“You’re crazy,” I said bluntly.

“You’re thinking you’ve never been in a
cavern under a Laurentian mountain, I sup-
pose. Very likely. Nor has Dr. Essen. Nor,
I imagine, Murray. But you will be, my
friend. So will we all.” The grin faded.
Now the deep voice was graver. “And we
are all changed, there in the egg. You under-
stand that?

“We are older, by a little, not temporally,
but in experience. You can see that on our
faces. We have all passed through strange
experiences — good, bad, awe-inspiring, per-
haps. And the men look — tired, older. But
Dr. Essen looks strangely younger.” He
shrugged heavily. “I don’t attempt to ex-
plain it. I can only report what I saw.” He
smiled at me.

“Well, so much for that. Don’t look so
stunned, Mr. Cortland ! I assure you it was
yourself. Which means that you will go
with us when we take our great leap into
the future, into the world of the Face. I
believe we will all stand together in the living
flesh before that great Face we have seen
only in our minds, today.

“Believe? I know it. Those people lying
asleep in the time-axis, with instruments on
the floor around them to regulate their slum-
bers, will go forward in time — have gone
forward. And they will return in the end to
here and now.

“They will go as the box went. From the
here and now, forward through the time-
axis to the world of the Face. But there is
no backward flow along that axis. No one
can risk meeting himself in his own past,
even if such a thing were possible. So when
we return, we must come as the box did,
along a path which is parallel to the axis, to
that continuous point in time which may be
millennia B.C., where the box originally
emerged.

“In effect, one goes forward with the flow
along the time axis and back around the cir-
cumference of the sphere which is time. And
there we enter the time-axis chamber again,
and are carried forward along the flow to
our own present time.” He smiled.

“Do you see what that means? It means
that one day those four in the Laurentian
cavern will waken. And as they wake, as
they step out, three men and a woman will
enter the chamber and begin their journey
into time!”

1 GAVE my head a quick shake. Images
were whirling in it like sparks from a
Fourth-of-July pinwheel. None of them
made sense to me, or perhaps only one. But
that one was definite.

“Oh no they won’t,” I said.

“Why not?”

“I will quote you a vulgarism,” I said
meticulously. “There may be flies on some
of you guys, but there ain’t no flies on me.
I’m not going. I know when I’m well off.
Jerry Cortland is staying right here with
both feet firm upon his own temporal axis.
I will write you the best story you ever saw
about yourself, Mr. De Kalb, but I won’t
climb on any merry-go-rounds with you. Is
that clear?”

He chuckled deeply.

“But you did, Mr. Cortland — you did!”

THE TIME AXIS 31

CHAPTER VI
The Military Mind

C OLONEL HARRISON MURRAY,
at sixty, still had a fine military figure
and was proud of it You could see him re-
member to throw his shoulders back and
pull in his waist about once every ten min-
utes. Then age and the subject at hand
would gradually divert him and he would
sag slowly— until he remembered again.

He had a discontented drooping mouth,
a face all flat slab-shaped planes and an in-
congruously high thin voice that got higher
when he was angry, which was most of the
time. He was angry now.

“A man can’t help it if he was born a
fool, De Kalb,” he said. “But luckily we’re
not all fools. You’re going to drop this idi-
otic sideline of yours, whatever it is, and
go back to work on our current job. You
agreed to assist the War Department — ”
He gave me a quick, wary glance. “You
agreed to do- a certain- job.”

“I’ve done it,” De Kalb told him. “I’ve
set up the Bureau and laid out all the plans.
Oh, it’s no secret — we’re not the only ones
who’ve been experimenting along this line.
I’ll be willing to bet Mr. Cortland knows
more than you think about this top-secret
Bureau of ours. How about that?”

He was looking at me. I said, “Well, I’ve
heard rumors on the grapevine. Hypnotism,
isn’t it?”

Murray swore softly. De Kalb chuckled.
“Subliminal hypnosis,” he said. “It doesn’t
matter, Colonel. The important secrets are
the specialized techniques that have been
worked out and they’re still under cover — I
hope. The Bureau is operating efficiently
now. I’ve set up the plan. Now there are
competent researchers doing quite as much
as I could do. If I stayed on now it would
simply be as a figurehead. My usefulness
was over when I explained my theories to
the technicians and psychologists who were
able to apply them. ”

“Allow me to decide that,” Murray said
angrily and there was a pause.

Quietly, from her chair by the window,
Dr. Essen spoke. “Ira, perhaps if Colonel
Murray saw the Record — ”

“Of course,” De Kalb said. “No use

squabbling any further. Cortland, will you
do the honors this time?”

I opened the cupboard door. I took down
the wrapped bundle which was the box. I
set it on the table between De Kalb and
Murray. The Colonel looked suspiciously at
it.

“If this is some childish joke — ” he began.

“I assure you, sir, it’s no joke. It is some-
thing the like of which you’ve never seen be-
fore, but there’s nothing humorous about it.
I think when you’ve looked into this — this
package — you’ll have no further objections
to the problem I’m working on-.”

De Kalb undid the wrappings. The stained
and battered box, blue-white, imperishable
as the time-currents upon which it had
drifted so long, lay there before us, the uni-
verse and the destiny of man locked inside
it.

E KALB’S fingers moved upon its
surface. There was a faint, distant
ringing as if the hinges moved to a sound
of music and the box unfolded like a flower.

I didn’t watch. I knew I’d get nothing
further from it now until my mind had rested
a little. I looked at the ceiling instead,
where the lights from the unfolded leaves
and facets of the Record moved in intricate
patterns on the white plaster. Even that
was hypnotic.

It was very quiet in the room. The si-
lence of the end of the world seemed to flow
out of the box in waves, engulfing all sound
except for De Kalb’s heavy breathing and
the quick, rasping breath that came and went
as Murray sat motionless, staring at the
flicker of lights that had been lit at the
world’s end and sent back to us along the
circumference of time.

I found that I was holding myself tense
in that silence. I was waiting— waiting for
the nova to burst again inside me, perhaps.
Waiting for another killing, perhaps some-
where in my sight this time, perhaps some-
one in this room. And I was waiting for
one thing more — the first spreading cold-
ness that might hint to me that my own flesh,
like the stone of the studio hearth, had given
root to the nekron.

The box closed. The lights vanished from
the ceiling.

Murray very slowly sat upright in his
cha'ir. . . .

De Kalb leaned back heavily, his curiously
dull eyes full on Murray’s face.

32 STARTLING STORIES

“And that’s the whole story,” he said.

It had taken over an hour of quick, in-
cisive questions and painstaking answers to
present Murray with a complete picture of
the situation in which he himself played so
curious a part. We all watched his face,
searching, I think, for some sign of the tre-
mendous intellectual and emotional experi-
ence through which everyone must go who
opened that box.

Nothing showed. It was the stranger be-
cause I knew Murray was almost a hysteric
psychologically. Perhaps he’d learned to
control himself when he had to. Certainly
he showed nothing of emotion as he shot his
cold, watchful questions at De Kalb.

“And you recognized me,” he said now,
narrowing his eyes at De Kalb. “I was in
that — that underground room?”

“You were.”

Murray regarded him quietly, his mouth
pulled downward in a curve of determina-
tion and anger.

“De Kalb,” he said, “you tell a good
story. But you’re a grasshopper. You al-
ways have been. You lose interest in every
project as soon as you think you’ve solved it.
Now listen to me a minute. The indoctrina-
tion project you were working on with me
is not yet fully solved. I know you think
so. But it isn’t. I see exactly what’s hap-
pened. Hypnosis as an indoctrination meth-
od has led you off onto this wild scheme.
You intend to use hypnosis on whatever
guineapigs you can enlist and — ”

“It isn’t true, Murray. It isn’t true.” De
Kalb was not even indignant, only weary.
“You saw the Record. You know.”

“All right,” Murray admitted after a mo-
ment. “I saw the Record. Very well. Sup-
pose you can go forward in time. Suppose
you step out, back in the here and now, ten
seconds after you step in. You say no time is
lost. But what energy you’ll lose, De Kalb !
You’ll be a different man, older, tired, full of
experiences. Disinterested, maybe, in my
project. I can’t let you do it. I’ll have to in-
sist you finish that first and then do what
you like on this Record deal of yours.”

“It can’t be done, Murray,” De Kalb said.
“You can’t get around it that way. I saw
you in the time-chamber, remember. You
did go.”

Murray put up an impatient hand. "Is
this telephone connected with the exchange ?
Thanks. I can’t argue with you, De Kalb. I
have a job to do.”

We all sat quiet, watching him as he put
a number through. He got his departmental
headquarters. He got the man he wanted.

“Murray speaking,” he said briskly. “I’m
at De Kalb’s in Connecticut. You know the
place ? I’m leaving immediately in my plane.
I want you to check me in as soon as I get
there, probably around three. I’m bringing
a man named Cortland with me, newspaper
fellow — you know his work? Good? Now
Listen, this is important.” Murray took a
deep breath and regarded me coldly over the
telephone. Very distinctly he said into it,
“Cortland is responsible for that series of
murders he reported from Brazil. I’m bring-
ing him in for questioning.”

CHAPTER VII
Out of Control

I DIDN’T like the way he flew his plane.

His hands kept jiggling with the con-
trols, his feet kept adjusting and readjusting
the tail-flaps so that the ship was in constant,
unnecessary side motion in the air. Murray
was nervous.

I looked down at the trees, the tilted
mountain slopes, the roads shining in the
sun, with little glittering black dots sliding
along it that were cars.

“You know you can’t get away with this,
Murray,” I said. It was, I think, almost the
first thing I had said to him since we took
off half an hour ago. After all, there had
been little to say. The situation was out of
all our hands, as Murray had meant it to be,
from the moment he spoke into the tele-
phone.

“I have got away with it, Cortland,” he
said, not looking at me.

“De Kalb has connections as powerful as
yours,” I told him. “Besides, I think I can
prove I’m not responsible for those deaths.”
“I think you are, Cortland. If there’s any
truth in what De Kalb was saying, I believe
you’re a carrier.”

“But you’re not doing this because you
think I’m guilty. You’re doing it to stop
De Kalb.”

“Certainly.” He snapped his lips shut.
I shrugged. That, of course, was obvious.

We flew on in silence. Murray was un-
easy, perhaps from the experience of the

THE TIME AXIS

Record. I think now that he had entirely
shut his mind to that. I think he was deny-
ing it had ever happened. But his hands
and feet still jittered on the controls until I
itched to take the plane away from him and
fly it myself.

It was a nice little ship, a six-passenger
job that could have flown alone, almost, as
any good plane can do in smooth air if the
pilot will only let it. I would probably have
said just then, if you’d asked me, that I was
in plenty of trouble. My troubles hadn't
started. They were about to.

The first intimation was the sound Mur-
ray made — a sort of deep, startled, incredu-
lous grunt. I started to turn toward him.
And then — time stopped.

I had a confused awareness that something
was moving through the ship, something
dark and frighteningly swift. But this time
there was a difference. The thing I had first
encountered in a Rio alley had returned. The
first pulse of that nova of blinding brilliance
burst outward from the core and center of
my body. But it did not rise to its climactic
explosion of pure violence. The energy sud-
denly was shut off at the source. The plane
was empty of that monstrous intruder.

Beside me Murray hunched over the con-
trols, slowly bending forward. I could not
see his face. That instant of relief passed
in a flashing time-beat.

A GAIN the pulse throbbed through me.

And again it was shut off. There was
something terribly wrong with gravity. The
earth stood upright in a blurred line that
bisected the sky and was slowly, slowly top-
pling over from left to right. The weight
of Murray’s body, slumped heavily forward,
was throwing the ship out of control.

I couldn’t move — not while those erratic
jumping shocks kept pounding at me.

But I had to move. I had to get hold of
the controls. And then, as I put forth all my
strength, the explosion channeled into my
brain-different, somehow incomplete. I
could feel a swiftly-fading ebb-tide draining
into the empty void.

Then it was gone altogether.

Another part of my mind must have taken
over then. And it must have been efficient.
Myself, I seemed to be floating somewhere
in a troubled void with the image erf Mur-
ray’s lolling head and limp arms. Murray —
dead. Dead ? He must be dead. I knew that
nekronic shock too well.

33

In the mindless void where my awareness
floated I knew that I was a bad 1 spot tem-
porally. Jerry Cortland was in a bad spot.
Murray’s headquarters must be expecting
him in already with a murder suspect in tow.
I was the murder suspect and murder had
been done again. And Murray and I had
been alone in mid-air when it happened.

The efficient part of my mind knew what
to do. I left it at that. I had no recollection
whatever of fighting the plane out of its
power dive or of turning in a long high cir-
cle as I got lost altitude back. But that must
have happened. Time and distance meant
nothing to the half of my mind that floated
but the other half very efficiently flew the
plane.

*****

“All right now?" De Kalb’s voice in-
quired.

I sat up shakily. The room was swimming
around me but it was a familiar room. I
could see Dr. Essen bending above a couch
and I could see polished boots and a shoulder
with something shiny on it. I must have
brought Murray back. Murray — dead?

“It was — it was the nekron," I said
thickly.

“I know, I know,” De Kalb said. “You
told us. Don’t you remember?"

“I don’t remember anything except Mur-
ray. ”

“I don’t think we can save him,” De Kalb
said in a flat voice.

“Then he’s alive?”

“Just.”

We both looked automatically toward the
couch, where Dr. Essen lifted a worried face.

“The adrenalin’s helping,” she said, “but
there’s no real improvement. He’ll sink
again as soon as the effect wears off.”

“Can’t we get him to a hospital?" I asked.

“I don’t think medical treatment will help
him,” De Kalb said. “Dr. Essen has a med-
ical degree, you know. She’s already done
everything the hospitals have tried on the
other victims.

“That creature strikes a place that scalpels
and oxygen and adrenaline can’t reach. I
don’t know what or where, but neither do
the doctors.” He moved his shoulders im-
patiently. “This is the first time the killer
hasn’t finished its job. You interrupted it,
you know — somehow. Do you know how?”

“It was intermittent,” I said hesitantly.

STARTLING STORIES

34

“It kept going away and coming back.” I
explained in as much detail as I could. It
wasn’t easy.

“The plane was moving fast, eh?” De
Kalb murmured. “So. Always before the
victims have been practically immobilized.
That might explain part of it. If the ne-
kronic creature is vibrating through time
it might need a fixed locus in space. And
the plane was moving very fast in space.
That could explain why the attack was in-
complete — but complete enough, after all.”

I nodded. “This is going to be pretty
hard to explain to Murray’s headquarters,”
I said.

“There’s been one call already,” De Kalb
told me. “I didn’t say anything. I had to
think.” He struck his fist into his palm im-
patiently and exclaimed : “I don’t understand
it’! I saw Murray with us in that cave! I
saw him!”

“Has it occurred to you, Ira,” Dr. Essen’s
gentle voice interrupted, “that what you may
have seen in the time-chamber was Colonel
Murray’s dead body, not Colonel Murray
asleep?”

E TURNED to stare at her.

“It seems clear to me,” she went on,
“that Mr. Cortland is a sort of catalyst in
our affairs. From the moment he entered
them things have speeded up rather fright-
eningly. I suggest it’s time to make a defi-
nite forward move. What do you think,
Ira?”

De Kalb frowned a little. “How’s Mur-
ray?” he asked.

“He’s dying,” she said flatly. “I know
of only one thing that could possibly post-
pone his death.”

“The neo-hypnosis, you mean,” De Kalb
said. “Well, yes — if it works. We’ve used
it on sleeping subjects, of course, but with
a man who is as far gone as Murray, I don’t
know.”

“We can try,” Dr. Essen said. “It’s a
chance. I don’t think he’d ever have entered
the time-axis of his own volition but this
way we can take him along. Things are
working out, Ira, very surprisingly.”

“Can we keep him alive until we reach the
shaft?” De Kalb asked.

“I think so. I can’t promise but — ”

“We can’t save him,” De Kalb said. “The
People of the Face — maybe. And after all,
Murray did go with us. I saw him. Mr.
Cortland, do von think that nlane would

carry the four of us as far as the Lauren-
tians?”

“Obviously, Mr. De Kalb,” I said with
somewhat hysterical irony, “obviously, if I
guess what you have in mind, it did!”'

* * * * *

You could see the shaft-mouth from a
long way up, dark above the paler slide of
dug earth, and shadowed by the thick green
of the Canadian mountains.

It was easier to spot from the air than to
reach on foot.

We left the plane in a little clearing at the
bottom of the slope. It seemed wildly reck-
less, but what else could we do? And we
carried Murray’s body up the mountain with
- us, De Kalb and I, while Dr. Essen, carry-
ing a square case about two feet through,
kept a watchful eye on the unconscious man.
Once she had to administer adrenalin to
Murray.

I still hadn’t come to any decision. I could
simply have walked away but that would
have meant shutting the last door of escape
behind me. I told myself that I’d think of
some other way before the final decision had
to be made. Meanwhile I went with the
others.

“It wouldn’t be as though I were run-
ning away from punishment,” I told De
Kalb wryly as we paused to catch our breath
on the lip of the shaft. Tree-tops swayed
and murmured below us, and the mountains
were warm in the late, slanting sunlight of
a summer evening.

“If your theories are right I won’t be
escaping from anything. The moment I step
into your time-trap my alter ego steps out
and goes on down the mountain to take his
medicine. All I can say is I hope he has a
fine alibi ready.”

“He will have — you will have,” De Kalb
said. “We’ll have all time at our disposal
to think one up in. Remember what our
real danger is, Cortland — the nekron. An
infection of the mind. An infection of the
earth itself and perhaps an infection in our
own flesh, yours and mine.

“What it is that I turned loose on the
world when I opened that box I don’t yet
know but I expect to know when I go down
that mountain again — ten minutes from now,
a million years from now. Both.” He shook
his head.

“Let’s sret on with it.” he said.

THE TIME AXIS

CHAPTER VIII
Fantastic Journey

I DON’T think I ever really meant to
embark on that fantastic journey along
the time axis. I helped carry Colonel Mur-
ray’s body down the dusty shaft but it was
a nightmare I walked through, not a real
experience. I knew at the bottom of the
tunnel I’d wake up in my hotel in Rio.

At the foot of the shaft was a hollowed
out room. Our flash-beams moved search-
ingly across the rough walls. We carried
Murray into the cave and laid him down
gently on a spot the scientist indicated. Dr.
Essen immediately became busy with her
patient. Presently she looked up and nodded
reassuringly.

“There’s time,” she said.

But De Kalb waved his arm, sending light
sliding erratically up the rock, and said,
“Time — there is time here! This space and
this air form one immutable axis upon which
all the past and the future turn like a wheel.”
It was bombastic but it was impressive
too. Dr. Essen and I were silent, trying to
grasp that imponderable concept, trying per-
haps to catch the sound of that vast turning:
But De Kalb had moved into action.

“Now,” he said, kneeling beside the black
suitcase Dr. Essen had set down. “Now you
shall see. Murray is all right for a while?
Then — ” He snapped open the case and
laid down its four sides so that the compact
instruments within stood up alone, light
catching in their steel surfaces.

He squatted down and began to unpack
them, to set up from among part of the
shining things a curious little structure like
a tree of glass and blinking lights, fitting
tiny jointed rods together, screwing bulbs
like infinitesimal soap-bubbles into invisible
sockets.

“Now, Letta,” he said presently, squinting
up at her in the dusty flash-beams, “your
turn.”

“Ira — ” She hesitated, shrugged uneasily.
“Very well.”

I held the light for them while they
worked.

After what seemed a long while De Kalb
grunted and sat back on his heels. There
was a thin, very high singing noise and the

35

tiny tree began to move. I let my flashlight
sink upon my knee. De Kalb reached over
and switched it off. Dr. Essen’s beam
blinked out with a soft click. It was dark
except for the slowly quickening spin of the
tree, the flicker of its infinitesimal lights.

Very gradually it seemed to me that a
gray brightness was beginning to dawn
around us, almost as if the whirling tree
threw off light that was tangible and accu-
mulated in the dusty air, hanging there upon
every mote of dust, spinning a web that
grew and grew.

It was gathering in an egg-shaped oval
that nearly filled the chamber.

B Y THE gray luminous dimness I could
see Dr. Essen with her hands on a
flat thick sheet of metal which she held
across her knees. There were raised bars of
wire across its upper surface and she seemed
almost to be playing it like a musical instru-
ment as her fingers moved over the bars.
There was no sound but the light slowly,
very slowly, broadened around us.

“In theory,” Dr. Essen said, “this would
have worked years ago. But in practice,
only this very special type of space provides
the conditions we need. I published some
papers in Forty-one on special atomic struc-
tures and the maintenance of artificial ma-
trix. But the displacement due to temporal
movement made practical application impos-
sible. Only at the time-axis would that dis-
placement theory become invalid.

"I am creating a rigid framework of mat-
ter now. Call it a matrix, except that the'
vibratory period is automatically adaptive, so
that it’s self-perpetuating and can’t be
harmed. Really, the practical application
would be something like this — if you were
driving a car and saw another car about to
collide with you, your own vehicle could
automatically adjust its structure and be-
come intangible. So — ”

“It isn’t necessary for Mr. Cortland to
understand this,” De Kalb said, his voice
suddenly almost gay. “Eager seeker after
truth though he may be. There is still much
1 don’t understand. We go into terra incog-
nita — but I think we will come to the Face
in the end.

“Somehow, against apparent logic, we
have managed to follow the rules of the
game. Somehow events have arranged them-
selves — in an unlikely fashion — so that all
four of us are entering the time axis where

STARTLING STORIES

36

all four of us lie asleep — intangible, impalpa-
ble and invisible except under ultraviolet.

“Murray may die. But since the nekronic
creature attacked through time, as I believe,
then perhaps sympathetic medicine may cure
the Colonel. Some poisons kill but cure in
larger doses. I don’t know. Perhaps the
long catalepsy outside time will enable Mur-
ray’s wound to heal — wherever it is. I sus-
pect that the people of the Face may have
foreseen all this. Are you getting drowsy,
Mr. Cortland?”

I was. The softly whirling tree, the sweet,
thin, monotonous sound of its turning were
very effective hypnotics though I hadn’t real-
ized it fully till now. I made a sudden con-
vulsive effort to rise. On the very verge of
the plunge I realized that my decision had
been made for me.

I FELT my nerve going. I didn’t want to
embark on this crazy endeavor at all. A
suicide must know this last instant of violent
revulsion the moment after he has pulled the
trigger or swallow r ed the poison. I put out
every ounce of energy I had — and moved
with infinite sluggishness, perhaps a quarter
of an inch from where I sat.

De Kalb’s voice said, “No, no. The ma-
trix has formed.”

My head was ringing.

The gray light was like a web that sealed
my eyes.

Through it, dimly, remotely, far off in
space and time, I thought I could see motion
stirring that was not our motion — and per-
haps was —

And perhaps was ourselves, at the other
end of the closing temporal circle, rising
from sleep after adventures a million years
in the future, a million years in the past.
But that motion was wholly theirs. I could
not stir.

Sealed in sleep, sealed in time, I felt my
consciousness sinking down like a candle-
flame, like a sinking fountain, down and
down to the levels below awareness.

The next thing I saw, I told myself out
of that infinite drowsiness, would be the Face
of Ea looking out over the red twilight of
the world’s end. And then the flame went
out, the fountain sank back upon the dark
wellspring of its origin far below the surfaces
of the mind.

“And now we wait,” De Kalb’s voice said,
ghostly, infinities away. “Now we wait — a
million years.”

CHAPTER IX

Strange Awakening

T HERE was a rhythmic ebb and flow of
waves on some murmurous shore. It
must, I thought, be part of my dream. . .
Dream ?

I couldn’t remember. The murmur was a
voice, but the things it said seemed to slip by
over the surface of my mind without waking
any ripples of comprehension. Sight ? I
could see nothing. There was movement
somewhere, but meaningless movement.
Feeling? Perhaps a mild warmth, no more.
Only the voice, very low — unless, after all,
it were some musical instrument.

But it spoke in English.

Had I been capable of surprise that should
have surprised me. But I was not. I was
utterly passive. I let sensations come and
go in the darkness that lay just beyond me,
on the other side of that wall of the silenced
senses. What world? What time? What
people? It didn’t matter yet.

“ — of waiting here so long,” the voice said
on a minor chord of sadness so intensely
sweet that my throat seemed to tighten in
response. Then it changed. It pleased — and
I knew even in my stupor that no one of
flesh and blood could possibly deny whatever
that strange sweet voice demanded.

“So I may go now, Lord? Oh, please,
please let me go !” The English was curious,
at once archaic and evolved. “An hour’s re-
freshment in the Swan Garden,” the plain-
tive voice urged, “and I shan’t droop so.”
Then a sigh, musical with a deliberate lilt.

“My hair — look at it, Lord ! The sparkles
all gone, all gone. Poor sparkles ! But only
an hour in the Swan Gardens and I’ll serve
you again. May I go, Lord? May I go?”
No one could have denied her. I lay there
enthralled by the sheer music of that voice.
It was like the shock of icy water in the face
to hear a man’s brisk voice reply.

“Save your tongue, save your tongue.
And don’t flatter me with the name of Lord.
This is business.”

“But so many hours already — I’ll die, I
know I’ll die ! You can't be so cruel — and
I’ll call you Lord anyhow. Why not? You
are my Lord now, since you have the power
to let me live or — ” Heart-rending sorrow
breathed in the sigh she gave.

THE TIME AXIS 37

“My poor hair,” she said. "The stars are
quite gone out of it now. Oh, how hideous
I am ! The sight of me when he wakes will
be too dreadful, Lord! Let me take one
little hour in the Swan Garden and — ”

"Be quiet. I want to think.”

There was silence for a moment or two.
Then the sweet voice murmured something
in a totally unfamiliar language, Sullenly.
The man said, “You know the rules, don’t
you ?”

“Yes, Lord. I’m sorry.”

“No more impudence, then. I know im-
pudence, even when I can’t understand it.
Pay attention to me now. I’m going to put
an end to this session. When this man wakes
bring him — ”

“To the Swam Garden? Oh, Lord Payn-
ter, now? I will love you forever!”

“It isn’t necessary,” the crisp voice said.
“Just bring him to the right station. The
City’s the nearest connection since this is
confidential so far. Do you understand?”
“The City? Walk through the City? I’ll
die before I’ve gone a dozen steps. My poor
slippers — oh, Lord Paynter, why not direct
transmission?”

“You’ll have new slippers if you need
them. I don’t want to remind you again all
this is secret work. We don’t want anybody
tuning in accidentally on our wave-length.
The transmitter in the City has the right
wave-band, so you can bring him — ”

H IS voice trailed off. The girl’s tones
interrupted, dying away in the dis-
tance in a faint, infinitely pitiable murmur-
ing quaver. There was a pause, then the
sound of light feet returning on some hard
surface and a rush of laughter like a spurt of
bright fountaining water.

“Old fool,” she said, and laughed again.

"If you think 7 care — ” The words changed
and were again incomprehensible, in some
language I had never heard even approxi-
mated before.

Then movement came, and light — a brief,
racking vertigo wrenched my brain around,

I opened my eyes and looked up into the
face of the girl, and logic was perfectly use-
less after that. Later I understood why,
knew what she was and why men’s hearts
moved at the sight and sound of her. But
then it was enough to see that flawless face,
the lovely curve of her lips, the eyes that
shifted from one hue to another, the hya-
cinth hair where the last stars pulsed and
died.

She was bending over me, the tips of her
scented ringlets brushing my shoulder. Her
voice was inhumanly sweet, and so soft with
warmth and reassurance that all my bewil-
derment melted away. It didn’t matter
where I was or what had happened, so long
as that lovely voice and that lovely face were
near — which was exactly the effect she had
meant to make and exactly the reason why
she was there.

I knew her face.

At that moment I was not even trying to
reason things out. My tongue felt thick and
my mind was lightly furred all over with the
effects of — what? Sleep? Some drug they
might have given me while I lay there help-
less? I didn’t know. I accepted all that was
happening with a mindless acquiescence.
Later I would wonder. Now I only stared
up at the lovely, familiar face and listened
to the lovely, remotely familiar voice.

“You’re all right now,” she was murmur-
ing, her changing eyes on mine. “Quite all
right. Don’t be worried. Do you feel strong
enough yet to sit up? I have something I

[ Turn page ]

38 STARTLING STORIES

want you to see.”

I got an elbow under me and levered my-
self slowly up, the girl helping. I looked
around.

I was dressed in unfamiliar dark garments
and I was sitting on a low couch apparently
composed of a solid block of some hard yet
resilient substance. We were alone together
in a smallish room whose walls looked like
the couch, hard yet faintly translucent, just
a little yielding to the touch. Everything
had the same color, a soft graylike mist or —
I thought dimly — sleep itself, the color of
sleep.

Idle girl was the color of — sunlight, per-
haps. Her smooth skin had an apricot glow
and her gown was of thin, thin silky stuff,
pale yellow, like layers of veiling that floated
when she moved. There were still a few
fading sparkles in her curls. Her eyes just
now were a clear bright blue that darkened
as I met them to something close to violet.

“Look,” she said. “Over there, behind
you, on the wall.”

I TURNED on the couch and looked.

The far wall had a circular opening in it.
Beyond the opening I could see rough rock
walls, a grayish glow of light, four figures
lying motionless on the dusty floor. For a
moment it meant nothing to me. My mind
was still dim with sleep. Then —

“The cave!” I said suddenly. And of
course, it was. That little glittering tree
which was the last thing T had seen before
sleep overtook me stood there, motionless
now. Beside it lay De Kalb.

Dr. Essen slumbered beyond him, the flat
metal sheet with the bars of wire still lean-
ing against her knee. She lay on her side,
the tired, gentle face half hidden by her bent
arm, the gray curls on the dusty floor. There
was a rather unexpected gracefulness to her
angular body as she lay there, utterly re-
laxed in a sleep that was already — how many
thousands of years long ?

My eyes lingered for an instant on her
face, moved on to Murray’s motionless body,
moved back again to search the woman’s
half-hidden features for a disturbing some-
thing I could not quite identify. It was — it
was —

The figure beyond Murray’s caught my
attention suddenly and for an instant my
mind went blank with amazement. The puz-
zle of Dr. Essen’s face vanished in this
larger surprise, the incredible identity of that

fourth person asleep in the dusty cove. I
gaped, speechless and without thought.

Up to that instant I suppose I had been
assuming simply that all of us were being
awakened, slowly and with difficulty, and
that I had awakened first. But the fourth
person asleep on the cavern floor was Jeremy
Cortland. Jerry Cortland — me.

I got to my feet unsteadily, finding after
a moment or two that I was in fairly good
control of all my faculties. The girl twit-
tered in concern.

“I’m all right,” I said. “But I’m still
there !”

Then I paused. “That means the others
may have wakened too. De Kalb — Dr. Es-
sen — have they — ?”

She hesitated. “Only you are awake,” she
said at last.

I walked on slightly uncertain feet across
the floor and peered into the cave. There
was no cave.

I knew it when I was close to the wall.
I could see the light reflected slightly on the
texture of the surface. The cave was only
another reflection, television perhaps, or
something more obscure, but with startlingly
convincing depth and clarity.

And if that scene was separated from me
iii space it might be distant in time as well —
I might be seeing a picture of something
hours or weeks old. It was an unpleasant
moment, that. So long as I thought myself
near to that last familiar link with my own
world I had maintained a certain confidence
that broke abruptly now. I looked around
a little wildly at the girl.

“I’m not in that cave now — they’re not
there now either, are they? This was just a
picture that was taken before any of us woke.
Did you wake first, then?” It was no good.
I knew that. I rubbed my hand across my
face and said, “Sorry. What did happen?”

CHAPTER X
Museum

S HE smiled dazzlingly. And for one flash
of an instant I knew who she was. I
knew why my eyes had been drawn back in
puzzled surprise to Letta Essen lying with
curious unexpected grace on the cavern floor.
I met this girl’s shining gaze and for that

THE TIME AXIS

one instant knew I was looking straight into
the keen gray eyes of Letta Essen.

The moment of certainty passed in a flash.
The girl’s eyes shifted from gray to luminous
blue, the long lashes fell and the unmistak-
able identity of a woman I knew vanished.
But the likeness remained. The familiarity
remained. This girl was Letta Essen.

My mind, groping for similes, seized at
first on the theory that in some fantastic
way Dr. Essen herself stood here before
me masked by some science of beauty be-
yond the sciences I knew, in a shell of youth
and loveliness through which only her keen
gaze showed.

It was all a trick, I thought — this is Letta
Essen who did wake before me, somehow
leaving her simulacrum there in the cave,
as I had. This is Letta Essen in some
amazingly lovely disguise for purposes of
her own and she’ll speak in a moment and
confess —

But it couldn’t have been a disguise. This
soft young loveliness was no mask. It was
the girl herself. And her features were the
features Letta Essen might have had twenty
years ago if she had lived a wholly different
life, a life as dedicated to beauty as Dr.
Essen’s had been to science.

Then I caught a bewildering gray flash
again and I knew it was Letta Essen — no
disguise, no variation on the features such
as kinship or remote descent might account
for. The mind is individual and unique.
There are no duplications of the personality
I knew I was looking into the eyes of Letta
Essen herself, no matter how impossible it
sccnicd

"Dr. Essen?” I said softly. "Dr. Essen?”

She laughed. “You’re still dreaming,”
she said. "Do you feel better now ? Lord
Paynter — the old fool — is waiting for us.
We should hurry.”

I only gaped at her. What could I say?
If she wasn’t ready to explain how could
I force her to speak? And yet I knew.

“I’m here to welcome you, of course,”
she said lightly, speaking exactly as if I ,
were some stranger to whom she must be
polite, but who was of no real interest to
her. “I was trained for work like this — to
make people feel at ease. All this is a great
mystery but— well, Lord Paynter will have
to explain. I’m only an entertainer. But a
very good one. Oh, very good.

"Lord Paynter sent for me when he knew
you would awaken. He thought his own

ugly face might put you into such a mood
you’d never answer any questions.” She
giggled. "At least, I hope he thought so.”
She paused, regarding me with exactly the
cool keen speculative stare I had so often
met when the woman before me was Letta
Essen. Then she shrugged.

“He’ll tell you as much as you ought to
know, I suppose. It’s all much too mystify-
ing for me.” Her glance shifted to the
cavern where the sleepers lay motionless and
I thought there was bewilderment in her
eyes as she looked uneasily from face to
sleeping face. Again she shrugged.

"Well, we should go. If we’re late Lord
Paynter will have me beaten.” She seemed
very unconcerned about the prospect. "And
please don’t ask questions,” she added, “for
I’m not allowed to answer. Even if I knew
the answers. Even if I cared.”

I was watching her with such urgent at-
tention that my eyes ached with the effort
of trying to be more than eyes, trying to
pierce through her unconcern and see into
the depths of the mind which I was certain
was Letta Essen’s. She smiled carelessly at
me and turned away.

"Come along,” she said.

There was nothing for me to do but obey.
Clearly I was expected to play the same
game her actions indicated. With some
irony I said, “You can tell me your name,
can’t you?”

"I am Topaz — this week,” she said.
"Next week, perhaps — something else. But
you may think of me until then as Topaz.”

"Thanks,” I said dryly. “And what year
are you Topaz in? What country? Where
am I, anyhow?”

“The Lord Paynter will tell you that. I
don’t care to be beaten.”

“But you speak English. I can’t be very
far from home.”

"Oh, everyone' who matters knows
English. It’s the court language of the
Mother Planet, you see. The whole galaxy
operates on an English basic. There has to
be some common language. I — oh dear, I
will be beaten! Come along.”

She turned away, tugging me by the arm.
There was a button on the opposite wall and
the way she walked beside me toward it,
the way she reached to touch the button, fol-
lowed so definite a pattern of graceful mo-
tion that it seemed like dancing.

In the wall a shutter widened. Topaz
turned. "This is the City,” she told me.

STARTLING STORIES

40

1 HAD seen the beginnings of such places
in my own time. In the second level
under Chicago, by the canal — at Hoover
Dam — in the great bridges and the subways
of Manhattan. Those had been the rudi-
ments, ugly, crude, harsh. This was a city
of machines, a city of metal with blood of
invisible energy.

Ugly? No. But frightening — yes.

Topaz led me across a strip of pavement
to a cushioned car like a big cup and we
sat down in it and the car started, whether
or not on wheels I can’t say. It moved in
three dimensions, rising sharply in the air
sometimes to avoid collisions, to thread its
intricate pattern through that singing city.

The sound was, perhaps, the strangest
part. I kept watching and listening with the
automatic attention of the reporter, sense-
lessly making mental notes for articles I
would never write. A single note hummed
through the city, clear and loud as a trumpet,
sliding up and down the scale. Not music,
for there was no pattern, but much like a
clarinet, varied every changing second.

I asked Topaz about it. She gave me a
glance from Letta Essen’s eyes and said,
“Oh, that’s to make the noise bearable.
You can’t get rid of the noise, you know,
without sacrificing the effect but you can
transform it into harmonious sound that
does convey the proper things. There’s —
what do you call it — frequency modulation.
I think that’s it.

“All the noises of the City every second
add up to one key vibration, a non-harmonic,
and that’s simply augmented by a machine
so the audible result isn’t so unpleasant.
The only alternative would be to blanket it
completely and that would mean sacrificing
a good part of the total effect, you know.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “What do you
mean, effect?”

She turned in the car to look at me.
Suddenly she dimpled.

“No, I see you don’t understand. Well,
I won't explain. I’ll save it for a surprise.”
I didn’t argue with her. I was too busy
staring around me at the City. I can’t
describe it. I won’t try and I don’t need to.
You’ve read about such places, maybe pic-
tured them for yourself. Precision, perfect
functionalism, all one mighty machine made
up of machines.

There were no humans, no life, except for
us under the dome erf steel sky. The light
was gray, dear, oddly compact, and through

that steel-colored air the city trumpeted its
wailing cry of a world that was not my
world, a time that was yet to come.

Where was the red twilight of the world's
end ? Where was the Face of Ea, from
which the call for help had come ?

Or did that world lie somewhere just out-
side the city ? Something had gone strange-
ly wrong in the time-axis — that much was
certain. If I let myself think about it I’d
probably start gibbering. Things had been
taken out of my control and all I could do
was ride along.

We drew up before a towering steel and
plastic building. Topaz jumped briskly out
of the car, took my hand confidently and led
me into the low door before us. We had
stepped straight into an elevator apparently,
for a panel sighed shut behind us and I felt
the familiar pressure underfoot and the dis-
placed air that means a rapid rising up a
shaft.

The panel opened. We stepped out into a
small room similar to the one m which I had
awakened.

“Now,” Topaz said with relief. “We’re
here. You were very good and didn’t ask
too many questions, so before we go I’ll show
you something.”

She touched another button in the wall,
and a plate of metal slid downward out of
sight. There was thick glass behind it.
Topaz fingered the button again and the
glass slid down in turn. A gust of sweet-
smelling air blew in upon us. I caught my
breath and leaned forward to stare.

We were very high up in the city but we
were looking out over a blossoming country-
side, bright in the season of late spring. I
saw meadows deep in grass and yellow
flowers, far below. Streams winked in the
bright, clear sunlight, here and there fruit-
trees were in blossom. Bird-song rose and
fell in the sunshine.

“This, of course,” Topaz said, “is the
world we live in. There’s only one museum.”

“Museum?” I echoed almost absently,
“What museum?”

“The City. There’s only one. All ma-
chines and robots. Isn’t it horrible? They
built like that, you know, back in barbarous
times. We keep it in operation to show
what it was like. That’s why they can’t
blanket the noises altogether — it would spoil
the effect. But no one lives here. Only
students come sometimes. Our world is
out there.”

THE TIME AXIS

“But where do people live?” I asked.
“Not in — well, villages, communities ?”
“Oh no. Not any more. Not since the
dark ages. We have transmission now, you
see, so we don’t need to live huddled up
together. ”

“Transmission ?”

“This is a transmitter.” She waved at
the room behind us. “That other place,
where you woke, was a receiver.”

“Receiver of what? Transmitter of
what?” I felt like Alice talking to the
Caterpillar.

"Of matter, naturally. Much easier than
walking.” She pressed the stud again and
the glass and metal slid up to shut out that
glowing springtime world. “Now,” she said,
“We’ll go — wherever it is we’re going. I
don’t know. Lord Paynter — ”

“I know — the old fool.”

Topaz giggled. “Lord Paynter’s orders
are already on record. In a moment we’ll
see.” She did something with the buttons
on the wall. “Here we go,” she said.

Vertigo spun through my mind. The wail-
ing of that ancient, wonderful, monstrous
City died away.

CHAPTER XI
Thirty Second Interlude

I T WAS a little like going down fast in
an elevator. I didn’t lose consciousness
but the physical sensations of transmission
were so bewildering and so disorienting that
I might as well have been unconscious for
all the details I could give — then or later —
about what happens between transmitter and
receiver. All I know is that for a while the
walls shimmered around me and gravity
seemed to let go abruptly inside my body,
so that I was briefly very dizzy.

Then, without any perceptible spatial
change at all, the walls suddenly steadied
and were not translucent pale gray any
more, but hard dull steel, with the rivets
showing where plates overlapped and here
and there a streak of rust. I was in a some-
what smaller room than before. And I was
alone.

"Topaz?” I said tentatively, looking
around for her. “Topaz?” And then, more
loudly, “Dr. Essen — where are you?”

41

No answer, except for the echo of my
voice from those dull rusty walls.

This time it was harder to take. I don’t
know why. Maybe things like that are
cumulative. It was the second time I’d taken
a jump into the unknown, piloted by some-
body who was supposed to know the angles,
and come out at the far end alone and in the
wrong place.

I looked at the walls and fought down
sheer panic at the possibility that this time
I had really gone astray in the time-dimen-
sion and wakened here in the same room
from which I’d set out in the City museum,
a room now so aged that the wall surfaces
had worn away and the exposed steel cor-
roded and only I remained alive and im-
prisoned in a dead world.

It was a bad moment.

I had to do something to disprove the
idea. Obviously the one possible action was
to get out of there. I took a long step to-
ward the nearest wall —

And found myself staggering. Gravity
had gone wrong again. I weighed too much.
My knees were trying to buckle, as if the
one step had put nearly double my weight
upon them. I braced my legs and made it
to the wall in wide, plodding steps, com-
pensating in every muscle for that extra-
ordinary downward pull.

The moment my hand touched the wall
there was a noise of badly oiled hinges and
a door slid back in the steel.

Now let me get this straight.

Everything that happened happened ex-
tremely fast. It was only later that I realized
it, because I had no sense of being hurried.
But in the next thirty seconds the most
important thing that was to occur in that
world, so far as I was concerned, took place
with great speed and precision.

Through the opening came a cool dusty
light and the sound of buzzing, soft and
insistent. I guessed at anything and every-
thing.

I stood on the threshold of an enormous
room. It was braced, tremendously braced,
with rusted and pitted girders so heavy they
made me think of Karnak and the tremen-
dous architecture of the Egyptians. In an
intricate series of webs and meshes metal
girders ran through the great room, cat-
walks, but perhaps not for human beings,
since some were level while others tilted
dizzily and on a few one would have had to
walk upside-down, I noticed, though, that

STARTLING STORIES

42

while most of the catwalks were rusted those
on which a man could walk without slipping
off were scuffed shiny.

There was a series of broad high windows
all around the room. Through them I could
see a city.

Topaz had said there were no cities in her
civilization except for the Museum. Well,
perhaps there weren’t. Perhaps I had
plunged unknowingly into time again, and
looked upon a city like that Museum, no
longer preserved in dead perfection. This
city was living and very old. An obsolete
metropolis, perhaps a nekropolis in the
sense De Kalb had used the term. Every-
where was decay, rust, broken buildings,
dim lights.

The sky was black. But it was day out-
side. a strange, pallid day lit by bands of
thin light that lay like a borealis across the
dark heavens. Far off, bright but not blind-
ing, a double sun turned in the blackness.

UT there were people on the streets.
My confidence came back a little at the
sight of them, until I realized that something
curious was taking place all through the city
as I watched a strange, phantom-like flitting
of figures — men flashing into sight and out
again like apparitions in folk-lore. I stared,
bewildered, for an instant, before I realized
the answer.

Perhaps in. a city of the future like this
one I had expected vehicles or moving ways
of endless belts. Now I saw that at intervals
along the street were discs of dull metal set
in the pavement. A man would step on one
— and vanish. Another man would suddenly
appear on another, step off and hurry toward
a third disc.

It was matter-transmission, applied to the
thoroughly practical use of quick transporta-
tion.

I saw other things in that one quick look
about the city. I won’t detail them. The
fact qf the city itself is all that was important
about that phase of my thirty seconds’ ex-
perience there.

There were two other important things.
One was the activity going on in the enor-
mous room itself. And the third was waiting
almost at my elbow. But I’m taking these
in the reverse order of their urgency.

Something was happening on the far side
of the room. It wasn’t easy to see, because
of the distance and because a number of men
in dark close-fitting garments clustered

around it. I thought it might be an autopsy.

There was a table as high as an operating
table and a man or a body lay stretched out
on it. Above the table hung a web of thin,
shining, tenuous matter that might have been
lights or wires. It made me think, for no
clear reason, of a complex chart of the neural
system.

At the lower edge the bright lines ap-
peared to connect with the object on the
table. At the top they vanished into a maze
of ceiling connections I couldn’t follow.
Some of the wires, or lights,, were brilliantly
colored, others were silvery. Light and color
flowed along them, coalesced at intersec-
tions, glowed dazzlingly and flowed on along
diverse channels downward.

That was the thing of secondary impor-
tance which I saw there. The thing of
primary importance stood about six feet
away from me, waiting.

Now this is the difficult part. I must get
it as clear as I can.

A tall man stood facing me. He had been
standing there when the door opened.
Obviously he expected me. He wore tight-
fitting dark clothes like the others. He was
well-made, even handsome, with the emo-
tionless face of a Greek statue or a Buddha.

He was Ira De Kalb.

I had a moment of horrible internal ver-
tigo. as if the bottom had dropped wholly
out of my reason. It couldn’t be happening.
For this was De Kalb and it wasn't, exactly
as Topaz had been Dr. Essen — and not Dr.
Essen. In this case, at any rate, there was
almost no physical difference. This man
before me was the man I had last seen asleep
in the cavern of the time-axis, no younger,
no older, not changed at all except for one
small thing.

The Ira De Kalb I had known possessed
strange veiled eyes, filmed like a bird’s,
grayed with light blue dullness. But this De
Kalb, who regarded me with unrecognizing
coldness, as if he had never seen me before
in his life, looked out of curiously changed
eyes.

IS eyes were made of metal.

It was living metal, like burnished
steel with depth behind it, yet not real steel
— some alloy unknown to me, some bright
unstable thing like quicksilver. I could see
my own face reflected in the eyes, very small
and vivid, and as my reflection moved, the
eyes moved 1 too.

THE TIME AXIS 43

I took a deep breath and opened my
mouth to speak his name.

But I did not make a sound. There wasn’t
time. He had been standing there with an
immobility that was not human. An image
of metal would stand like that, not seeming
to breathe, no tiniest random motion stirring
it. And I had an instant’s uncanny recollec-
tion that the De Kalb I knew had moved
with curious clumsiness, like an automaton.

Then the metal eyes moved.

No, I moved.

It was a fall, in a way. But no fall I could
accurately describe. It was motion of ab-
normal motor impulses, fantastic simply be-
cause they were wuthout precedent. One
walks, actually, in a succession of forward-
falling movements, the legs automatically
swinging forward to save one from collapse
toward the center of gravity.

This was reaction to a sort of warped
gravitational pull that drew me toward De
Kalb. It was the opposite of paralysis — a
new gravitation had appeared and I was
jailing toward it. It was like rushing down
a ^teep slope, unable to halt oneself.

His strange, smooth face was expression-
less but the metal eyes moved, watching me,
reflecting my twin images that grew larger
and larger as I fell upon him down a ver-
tiginous abyss. The eyes came toward me
with an effect of terrible hypnosis, probing
into mine, stabbing through the reflection of
my own face, my own eyes, and pinning the
brain in mv skull — probbing into mv mind
and the little chamber behind the mind,
where the ego lives.

Then he was looking out — through my
own eyes ! Deep in my brain the metal ga/.e
crouched, looking watchfully outward, seeing
what I saw.

A telepathic rapport? I couldn’t explain
it. All I knew was the fact. De Kalb was a
spy in my brain now.

I turned around. I went back toward the
door into the transmission room. I closed
the door. I was alone there. But the metal
eyes looked at the room as I looked at it.
I had no control over my motions while I
saw my own hand rise and finger the wall.
But when the room began to shimmer and
the disorientation of matter-transmission
shivered through my body I knew I had my
muscles and my will back again. I was free
to move as I liked. I was free to think and
speak —

But not about what had just happened.

It may have been something like post-
hypnotic command, to give it a label. That’s
familiar and easy to explain. But it wasn’t
easy for me. Remember, I’d looked into
De Kalb’s quicksilver eyes.

All this happened in something under
thirty seconds. I’ve given you, of course,
conclusions and afterthoughts that came to
me much later, when I had time to think
over what I’d seen and correlate it. But I
woke in the rusted room, I looked out into a
city on a planet outside our solar system, I
saw something like an autopsy in a vast
laboratory braced as if to withstand unearth-
ly pressures, I met the gaze of Ira De Kalb
and then the thing had happened between
us — happened. And I returned to the trans-
mitter.

The room vibrated and vanished.

CHAPTER XII
The Swan Garden

OPAZ squealed with sheer delight.
“Come on out!’’ she cried. “It's the
Swan Garden ! What are you waiting for
anyhow? I'll take back all I ever said about
Lord Paynter. Oh, do look, isn’t it wonder-
ful here?”

Silently I stepped after her through the
door.

So little actual time had elapsed that I
don't think she really missed me. Some-
thing had reached out through the matter-
transmitter and intercepted one of us and let
the other go on. But Topaz must have
rushed out of the door the moment it opened
and been too overcome with pleasure at find-
ing herself just here to realize I was lagging
behind.

And I — had I really been for a round-trip
through a galaxy? Had I dreamed it? Was
this whole interlude a dream while my own
body slept in the time-axis, waiting for the
world’s end? In preparation for that sleep
I had begun to learn how to ignore time as
a factor in our plans.

In this world, waking or sleeping, evident-
ly I must learn to ignore space. Distance
meant nothing here with the matter-trans-
mitters functioning as they did. You could
live on Centaurus and get your breakfast
rolls fresh from, a bakery in Chicago.

44

STARTLING STORIES

You could drop in on a friend on Sirius
to borrow a book, simply because it might
be easier than to walk around the comer
for one. And in the annihilation of space,
time too seemed to undergo a certain
annihilation. Just as, in ignoring time, you
could as a corollary overstep space.

I had overstepped reason too. I had come
into a world where nothing made sense to
me, where the people who had been my com-
panions moved behind masks, stirred by
motives that were gibberish. I had over-
stepped both space and time just now, and
so compactly that the girl who called herself
Topaz never missed me.

I was still too dazed to argue. I could
control my own motions again but my mind
had suffered too much bewilderment to
function very well. I followed Topaz
dumbly, staring about me at the remarkable
landscape of the Swan Garden — knowing in
some indescribable way that inside my mind
other eyes stared too, impassive metal eyes
that watched my thoughts as they watched
the things around me.

Topaz spun around twice in sheer delight,
her sun-colored veils flying. Then she ran
her hands through her hair, dislodging a last
sparkle or two, and, smiling at me over her
shoulder, beckoned and hurried ahead
through what seemed to be a wall of white
lace.

A gentle breeze stirred it, shivering the
folds together and I saw that we were fol-
lowing a narrow path through a grove of
head-high growths like palmetto, except that
the leaves and flowers were white, and
shaped like enormous snow-flakes, each a
perfect crystalline pattern and every one dif-
ferent from every other.

Topaz ran her hands lovingly through the
flowers as we went down the path. Under-
foot the ground had the look and feel of
soft down. After a moment we entered a
cleared space with what seemed at first
glance a stream of water tracing an arabes-
que path among huge, humped boulders.
The breeze freshened, the lacy curtains
shimmered and thinned before it and I saw
a gossamer vista beyond of unreal gardens
where fantastic beauties lay in wait.

“Sit down,” Topaz said. “I don’t know
why Lord Paynter sent us here but I suppose
he’ll join us when he’s ready. Isn’t it lovely?
Now I can have my hair starred again. Oh,
do sit down ! Right there, on that — ”

"That rock?” I asked.

"No, that chair. Look.” She sank lightly
on one of the boulders and it curved and
moulded itself beneath her to a couch the
shape of her body, fitting every bend of her
limbs perfectly. It looked very comfortable.

I GRINNED at her and sat down myself,
feeling thick, resilient softness yielding
as I sank. Deliberately I turned off my mind.
Events wholly beyond my control had
catapulted me into this world and this com-
plex situation.

The only way I could keep sane was to
ride along without a struggle until the time
for action came. I thought I’d know it when
it did. There was no use asking questions of
this lovely deliberately feather-brained little
creature beside me. Perhaps, when Paynter
came —

"Have some fruit,” Topaz invited, gestur-
ing at the stream flowing past.

I looked again. It wasn’t a stream. Call
it a tube, of flowing crystal, hanging un-
supported in the air about three feet off the
ground. It came out of the downy earth at
the edge of the trees, twisted intricately
around the boulders and dived into the
ground again farther on. From where I sat
I could touch one arch of it without stretch-
ing-

Drifting past my hand came a globe, large
as an orange, of a pale green translucence.
Topaz put out her hand, waited for it to
drift nearer, plucked it out of the stream.
She gave it to me, cool and dripping from
its bath.

"Eat it if you like,” she said. “Choose
what you will. I’m going away for awhile.
Oh, I’ve been so good to you! Hours and
hours I sat waiting for them to wake you up
and my hair grew all dull and horrible.”
She shook her curls and her face brightened.

"I’ll show you,” she promised. “I’ll use
the star-powder all over. It takes some plan-
ning, though. The stars in my hair will have
to be a different color and my face — a half-
mask, do you think? A dark mask, set off
by the stars? Or jet stars along my arms,
like gloves.”

Somewhere among the trees in the direc-
tion from which we had just come a gong
sounded one clear note. Topaz looked up.
“Oh,” she said. “Lord Paynter.”

I felt in the center of my mind a sudden
quickening of interest. The spy who had
usurped my senses was preparing for action.
But — what action ?

45

THE TIME AXIS

I bit into the pale green fruit Topaz had
handed me. It wasn’t yet my problem. If
anything, it was De Kalb’s. I’d have to
know more before I could do a thing. I
sank my teeth into crisp moist sweetness
that tingled on the tongue like something
mildly alcoholic. It was delicious.

‘'“Lord Payrrter — welcome to the Swan
Garden!” Topaz rose from her rock and
swept an elaborate and probably ironic
curtsey, her bright veils billowing. “Hideous
as I am,” she added, “and it’s all your fault,
I make you welcome. I —

“Be quiet, Topaz,” a familiar voice said.

I got to my feet and turned to face him as
he came out from among the crystal-shaped
flowers that hid the path. It was the voice
I had heard in my dim awakening moments
here. But it seemed to me now even more
familiar than that. A thin cold flat voice, a
little too high. Oh yes, I had heard it be-
fore — perhaps a thousand years before.

He was a tall man, big, thick, heavy, with
a fine military bearing. He had a down-
drooping mouth between the flat slabs of his
cheeks, very sharp pale blue eyes — Murray’s
eyes, Murray’s face, Murray’s voice. It was
Colonel Harrison Murray.

It wasn’t surprising, of course. So far as
I knew, there might be other people in this
world and there might not be. Maybe it
was simply a dream, peopled by the three
who still lay asleep beside me in the time-
axis, dreaming as I dreamed. Only, they
didn’t suspect, apparently. They thought all
this was real. Only I knew that the whole
thing might explode like a bubble at any
moment. . . .

Murray, rf this were not a dream, had been
healed in the long bath of time, for he looked
perfectly restored now. That injury to the
hidden place of the mind or the soul or the
body, where the nekronic being struck, was
something that could mend then, with time.
With time —

Were we in the world of the Face? Had
we wakened ? Did we still sleep ? How could
I possibly find myself now in a world where
Dr. Essen moved behind a mask of beauty
by the name of Topaz and Murray, un-
changed in any particular, called himself
Paynter with a perfectly straight face, and
De Kalb — De Kalb — what about De Kalb?

I do not know.

Blankly I looked around. No one had
spoken. But the voice was in my brain. De

Kalb? It came again.

I do not know but I intend to learn. Be
quiet and we will learn together.

P AYNTER strode briskly forward, his
boots ringing on the downy earth. He
wore what might have been a uniform, tight-
fitting, dun-colored. He gave me a keen,
competent glance in which no recognition
stirred, then nodded.

“Good day. Hope you’re feeling better.
All right, men, bring the boxes over here.”
He stood aside and; two men in uniform
lugged forward a gray box the size of a
small table. It had metal banding around it
and a series of sockets along the top. They
set a second and smaller box beside it and
stood waiting.

I found myself staring at them with far
more interest than I felt in the boxes. Here
were the first people I had seen closely, at
first hand, who didn’t belong in the dream.
Their presence shook me a little. Perhaps
it wasn’t a dream then. Perhaps there really
was a tangible world around us, outside this
garden. Perhaps I had really awakened out
of the time-axis.

I turned to look at Murray — at Paynter —
who still regarded me keenly as he sat down
on one of the rubber-foam rocks. I sat down
again too, watching him with new patience
now. I could afford to wait. After a moment
lie spoke.

“Topaz showed you the cave where we
found you?”

I nodded.

“Oh yes, I did everything you ordered,
Lord Paynter,” Topaz contributed. “I pre-
tended that nothing — ”

“Be quiet, Topaz,” Paynter said with
some irritation. And then to me, “What’s
your name?”

“Cortland,” I said, and added ironically,
“Lord Paynter.”

“Job Paynter,” he corrected me calmly.
“Topaz calls everybody Lord — when she
wants something. Call me Paynter. It isn’t
customary to use courtesy titles here.”
“Oh, hut it is,” Topaz said. She was
kneeling by the stream and flicking bits of
spray out of it. “Mister and Mistress and
Lord and — ”

“Topaz, stop playing and run away for
awhile.” Paynter was half irritated, half
indulgent.

“Oh, thank you, Lord Paynter !” She was
on her feet in an instant, beaming with